process very large JSON files with jq using --stream/fromstream instead of loading the whole document into memory
domain: jqlang.org · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Add --stream so jq parses the input incrementally and emits [path, leaf-value] / [path] event pairs as it goes, instead of waiting for the entire document to parse before producing output.
Reconstruct whole top-level values from the raw stream events using fromstream(...) combined with truncate_stream(inputs) at the desired path depth, e.g. `jq --stream 'fromstream(1|truncate_stream(inputs))'` to get one JSON value per top-level array element.
Use tostream (the inverse of fromstream) when converting an in-memory value back into streamed event form while composing custom stream-processing filters.
Filter events by path before reconstruction to avoid materializing parts of the document that aren't needed.
For newline-delimited JSON (one record per line), prefer plain `jq -c` processed line by line instead of --stream, since each line is already a small independent document.
Known gotchas
Streaming mode's raw output (path/leaf-value pairs) is not directly usable as ordinary JSON; nearly every --stream use case requires piping through fromstream/truncate_stream, and skipping this step produces confusing low-level path arrays.
--stream trades memory efficiency for CPU overhead and more complex filter logic; for files that comfortably fit in memory, ordinary non-streaming jq filters are simpler and often faster to write correctly.
The truncation depth passed to truncate_stream must match the nesting level of the values being reconstructed; an incorrect depth yields fragments of values or several nested values merged incorrectly.
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