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How to open a large JSON file (1 GB, 2 GB, 5 GB)

Text editors and browsers try to load the whole file into RAM, so a multi-gigabyte JSON file freezes them. jsonreshape never does that: it indexes the file once — recording the byte offset of every record — and then reads only the records you actually look at. A 2 GB file is ready to browse in about 3 seconds.

Desktop app

  1. Install jsonreshape (see Installation) and run jsonreshape-gui.
  2. Choose File → Open, drag the file onto the window, or right-click the file in Windows and pick Open with → jsonreshape.
  3. Browse the tree on the left — every node shows its type and byte size — and the selected record is shown as formatted text on the right. Scrolling loads records on demand.

The jsonreshape viewer

Command line

jsonreshape inspect big.json --sample 10000

inspect reports the record count, the fields and their types, and size statistics, reading only a sample. It can read from stdin too, so you can inspect a compressed stream without unpacking it to disk:

jsonreshape inspect - < data.json.gz

What you can open

  • JSON arrays ([ {...}, {...} ]) and single large objects.
  • JSON Lines / NDJSON (.jsonl, .ndjson) — one record per line.
  • Files from 100 MB to several GB. Memory grows with the number of records, not the file size, so it stays low — a 10-million-record sort peaks under 400 MB.

Next steps