Parsing large JSON file with Scala and JSON4S - json

Question

I'm working with Scala in IntelliJ IDEA 15 and trying to parse a large twitter record json file and count the total number of hashtags. I am very new to Scala and the idea of functional programming. Each line in the json file is a json object (representing a tweet). Each line in the file starts like so:
{"in_reply_to_status_id":null,"text":"To my followers sorry..
{"in_reply_to_status_id":null,"text":"#victory","in_reply_to_screen_name"..
{"in_reply_to_status_id":null,"text":"I'm so full I can't move"..
I am most interested in a property called "entities" which contains a property called "hastags" with a list of hashtags. Here is an example:
"entities":{"hashtags":[{"text":"thewayiseeit","indices":[0,13]}],"user_mentions":[],"urls":[]},
I've browsed the various scala frameworks for parsing json and have decided to use json4s. I have the following code in my Scala script.
import org.json4s.native.JsonMethods._
var json: String = ""
for (line <- io.Source.fromFile("twitter38.json").getLines) json += line
val data = parse(json)
My logic here is that I am trying to read each line from twitter38.json into a string and then parse the entire string with parse(). The parse function is throwing an error claiming:
"Type mismatch, expected: Nothing, found:String."
I have seen examples that use parse() on strings that hold json objects such as
val jsontest =
"""{
|"name" : "bob",
|"age" : "50",
|"gender" : "male"
|}
""".stripMargin
val data = parse(jsontest)
but I have received the same error. I am coming from an object oriented programming background, is there something fundamentally wrong with the way I am approaching this problem?

Answer 1

You have most likely incorrectly imported dependencies to your Intellij project or modules into your file. Make sure you have the following lines imported:
import org.json4s.native.JsonMethods._
Even if you correctly import this module, parse(String: json) will not work for you, because you have incorrectly formed a json. Your json String will look like this:
"""{"in_reply_...":"someValue1"}{"in_reply_...":"someValues2"}"""
but should look as follows to be a valid json that can be parsed:
"""{{"in_reply_...":"someValue1"},{"in_reply_...":"someValues2"}}"""
i.e. you need starting and ending brackets for the json, and a comma between each line of tweets. Please read the json4s documenation for more information.

Answer 2

Although being almost 6 years old, I think this question deserves another try.
JSON format has a few misunderstandings in people's minds, especially how they are stored and how they are read back.
JSON documents, are stored as either a single object having all the other fields, or an array of multiple object possibly in same format. this second part is important because arrays in almost every programming language are defined by angle brackets and values separated by commas (note here I used a person object as my single value):
[
{"name":"John","surname":"Doe"},
{"name":"Jane","surname":"Doe"}
]
also note that everything except brackets, numbers and booleans are enclosed in quotes when written into file.
however, there is another use that is not official but preferred to transfer datasets easily where every object, or document as in nosql/mongo language, are stored in a new line like this:
{"name":"John","surname":"Doe"}
{"name":"Jane","surname":"Doe"}
so for the question, OP has a document written in this second form, but tries an algorithm written to read the first form. following code has few simple changes to achieve this, and the user must read the file knowing that:
var json: String = "["
for (line <- io.Source.fromFile("twitter38.json").getLines) json += line + ","
json=json.splitAt(json.length()-1)._1
json+= "]"
val data = parse(json)
PS: although #sbrannon, has the correct idea, the example he/she gave has mistakenly curly braces instead of angle brackets to surround the data.
EDIT: I have added json=json.splitAt(json.length()-1)._1 because the code above ends with a trailing comma which will cause parse error per the JSON format definition.