How to deserialize a file with peculiar data set of JSON objects

Question

I'm trying to deserialize a file that contains data set of JSON objects that are not separated by commas

{
"passages": [
         {
          "is_selected": 1, 
          "url": "http://someUrl.com", 
          "passage_text": "someTextHere"
         }, 
         {
          "is_selected": 0, 
          "url": "http://someUrl.com", 
          "passage_text": "someTextHere""
         }, 
            ], 
              "query_id": 9749, 
              "answers": ["Here is the answer"], 
              "query_type": "description", 
              "query": "Here is my query"
}

{
"passages": [
         {
          "is_selected": 0, 
          "url": "http://someAnotherUrl.com", 
          "passage_text": "someAnotherTextHere"
         }, 
         {
          "is_selected": 1, 
          "url": "http://someAnotherUrl.com", 
          "passage_text": "someAnotherTextHere""
         }, 
            ], 
              "query_id": 0564, 
              "answers": ["Here is the another answer"], 
              "query_type": "another description", 
              "query": "Here is my another query"
}

I am trying to use this code with Newtonsoft.JSON deserialization but it returns an exception

"An unhandled exception of type 'Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializationException' occurred in Newtonsoft.Json.dll

Additional information: Cannot deserialize the current JSON object (e.g. {"name":"value"}) into type 'System.Collections.Generic.List`1[JsonParser.DataSet]' because the type requires a JSON array (e.g. [1,2,3]) to deserialize correctly."

public class DataSet
{
    public List<Passage> passages { get; set; }
    public int query_id { get; set; }
    public List<string> answers { get; set; }
    public string query_type { get; set; }
    public string query { get; set; }
    public int Count { get; internal set; }
}

public class Passage
{
    public int is_selected { get; set; }
    public Uri url { get; set; }
    public string passage_text { get; set; }
}

class Program
{
    public static string jsonFileLocation = @"C:\my.json"; 

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        using (StreamReader file = File.OpenText(jsonFileLocation))
        {
            JsonSerializer serializer = new JsonSerializer();
            List<DataSet> data = (List<DataSet>)serializer.Deserialize(file, typeof(List<DataSet>));                                
        }
    }
}

I do not think it's a good idea to place commas and brackets manually to bring the file to JSON format because this file contains several thousand records. Have you any ideas how to parse and deserialize this file?

Answer 1

If the file is consistent in that each JSON node is separated by a new line character, you could first stream the file into a System.String and replace all instances of:

}

{

with:

},
{

Then, deserialize the JSON string. This is just one idea.