Reading the data written to s3 by Amazon Kinesis Firehose stream

Question

I am writing record to Kinesis Firehose stream that is eventually written to a S3 file by Amazon Kinesis Firehose.

My record object looks like

ItemPurcha         


        

Answer 1

You can find the each valid JSON by counting the brackets. Assuming the file starts with a { this python snippet should work:

import json

def read_block(stream):
    open_brackets = 0
    block = ''
    while True:
        c = stream.read(1)
        if not c:
            break

        if c == '{':
            open_brackets += 1
        elif c == '}':
            open_brackets -= 1

        block += c

        if open_brackets == 0:
            yield block
            block = ''


if __name__ == "__main__":
    c = 0
    with open('firehose_json_blob', 'r') as f:
        for block in read_block(f):
            record = json.loads(block)
            print(record)

Answer 2

If there's a way to change the way data is written, please separate all the records by a line. That way you can read the data simply, line by line. If not, then simply build a scanner object which takes "}" as a delimiter and use the scanner to read. That would do the job.

Answer 3

If the input source for the firehose is an Analytics application, this concatenated JSON without a delimiter is a known issue as cited here. You should have a lambda function as here that outputs JSON objects in multiple lines.

Answer 4

I think the best ways to tackle this is to first create a properly formatted json file containing well separated json objects within them. In my case I added ',' to the events which was pushed into the firehose. Then After a file is saved in s3, all the files will contain json object separated by some delimitter(comma- in our case). Another thing that must be added are '[' and ']' at the beginning and end of the file. Then you have a proper json file containing multiple json objects. Parsing them will be possible now.

Answer 5

I used a transformation Lambda to add a line break at the end of every record

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    output = []

    for record in event['records']:

        # Decode from base64 (Firehose records are base64 encoded)
        payload = base64.b64decode(record['data'])

        # Read json as utf-8    
        json_string = payload.decode("utf-8")

        # Add a line break
        output_json_with_line_break = json_string + "\n"

        # Encode the data
        encoded_bytes = base64.b64encode(bytearray(output_json_with_line_break, 'utf-8'))
        encoded_string = str(encoded_bytes, 'utf-8')

        # Create a deep copy of the record and append to output with transformed data
        output_record = copy.deepcopy(record)
        output_record['data'] = encoded_string
        output_record['result'] = 'Ok'

        output.append(output_record)

    print('Successfully processed {} records.'.format(len(event['records'])))

    return {'records': output}

Answer 6

I also had the same problem, here is how I solved.

1. replace "}{" with "}\n{"

2. line split by "\n".

   input_json_rdd.map(lambda x : re.sub("}{", "}\n{", x, flags=re.UNICODE))
                 .flatMap(lambda line: line.split("\n"))
   

A nested json object has several "}"s, so split line by "}" doesn't solve the problem.