Reading JSON with id outside curly brackets and no quotation marks

Question

I am having some troubles importing a json file to R with the following format:

C135-HR2459 {"number_a": 1, "number_b":2} 
C156-HR2249 {"number_a": 1, "number_b":2} 

It would have worked if it had the following format:

{"id": C135-HR2459, "number_a": 1, "number_b":2} 
{"id": C156-HR2249, "number_a": 1, "number_b":2} 

Answer 1

Using Notepad++, you can do:

• Ctrl+H
• Find what: ^(\S+) {
• Replace with: {"id": "$1",
• CHECK Wrap around
• CHECK Regular expression
• UNCHECK . matches newline
• Replace all

Explanation:

^           # beginning of line
(\S+)       # group 1, 1 or more non space character; you can use (.+?) if the string contains spaces
            # 1 space
{           # open curly brace

Replacement:

{"id": "    # literally
$1          # content of group 1
",          # literally, there is a space after the comma

Screenshot (before):

Screenshot (after):