I have both JSON file and JL file on my computer but when I open them in Notepad their structure looks like the same. What is the difference between them? where shall I use each one?
3 Answers
Actually, the time that I was asking this question I didn't know that "the file type is no guarantee of what is inside it". in other words I thought that for every file name there is a separate manifesto and if a files name is ".something", there is a unique manifesto for it. But now I know that I can create a file, write anything that I want into it and name it ".peyman" and yes there is nothing special with it!
What was that file? the file was JSON Lines file format.
Where did I find it? in the Scrapy except writing scrapy crawl name -o file.json I saw that somebody wrote scrapy crawl name -o file.jl. I tried that and the file was 99% like JSON file so I wondered and asked this question here.
So:
What is the difference between a .JSON file and .JL file? Now I know that the better question is "What is the difference between a .JSON file and .JL file in the Scrapy?"
The JSON Line is like JSON but without the "[" and "]" at the beginning and the end. it is used in the Scrapy because of this
There's quite a few things that a jl file extension could be referring to. If I remember correctly, it originally had something to do with the window manager Sawfish.
Sawfish was developed in Lisp, and the jl file was a Lisp source file for Sawfish. However, I'm guessing (because you said that inside was JSON-like sauce) that's not what you're asking about.
In that case, I do recall a few projects on GitHub... JSON lambda and Julia.
Both of those may be the reason why you're seeing JSON in a jl file. Without more information on where you got that file, or what it was part of, though, we won't be able to help you much.
That said, file extensions rarely matter in terms of Linux. In Windows, they're far more important, but in Linux you could literally append anything to a file as an "extension" (ie. thisfile.whatever) and you could still open it up in an editor. The same is true for most editors in Windows.
Likely, the packager of that file decided on jl for their own reasons, rather than following convention of using .json.
I guess JL extension is used for many purposes, but JL is also one of the few extensions used for JSON-lines (also known as NDJSON or JSONL).
This format can contain multiple JSON values, one JSON value (with "compact" formatting) per line and is useful for e.g. streaming or logging.
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