Debug a large json file that is in one line - json

Question

I have a 2MB json file that is only all in one line and now I get an error using jq:
$ jq .<nodes.json
parse error: Invalid literal at line 1, column 377140
How do I debug this on the console? To look at the mentioned column, I tried this:
head -c 377139 nodes.json|tail -c 1000
But I cannot find any error with a wrong t there, so it seems it is not the correct way to reach the position in the file.
How can I debug such a one-liner?

Answer 1

cut the file into more lines with
cat nodes.json|cut -f 1- -d} --output-delimiter=$'}\n'>/tmp/a.json
and analyse /tmp/a.json with, then you get an error with line nr:
parse error: Invalid literal at line 5995, column 47
use less -N /tmp/a.json to find that line

Answer 2

I see you are on a shell prompt. So you could try perl, because your operating system has it pre-installed, presumably.
cat nodes.json | json_xs -f json -t json-pretty
This tells the json_xs command line program to parse the file and prettify it.
If you don't have json_xs installed, you could try json_pp (pp is for pure-perl).
If you have neither, you must install the JSON::XS perl module with this command:
sudo cpanm JSON::XS
[sudo] password for knb:
--> Working on JSON::XS
Fetching http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/M/ML/MLEHMANN/JSON-XS-3.01.tar.gz ... OK
Configuring JSON-XS-3.01 ... OK
Building and testing JSON-XS-3.01 ... OK
Successfully installed JSON-XS-3.01 (upgraded from 2.34)
1 distribution installed
This installs JSON::XS and a few helper scripts, among them json_xs and json_pp.
Then you can run this simple one-liner:
cat dat.json | json_xs -f json -t json-pretty
After misplacing a parenthesis to force a nesting-error somewhere in the valid json file dat.json I got this:
cat dat.json | json_xs -f json -t json-pretty
'"' expected, at character offset 1331 (before "{"A_DESC":"density i...") at /usr/local/bin/json_xs line 181, <STDIN> line 1.
Maybe this is more informative than the jq output.