How an incremental JSON parser fixes SSE stream fragmentation in chat apps
A developer building a streaming chat interface discovered that their JSON parser was crashing because Server-Sent Events (SSE) does not guarantee each event contains a complete JSON object. The SSE protocol flushes whatever bytes are ready, meaning a single JSON object can be split across multiple events or several objects can arrive in one event. The naive approach of calling json.loads() on each event's data field failed whenever a fragment lacked proper opening or closing braces. The fix involved using Python's json.JSONDecoder.raw_decode to build an incremental parser that buffers incoming chunks and only yields fully formed objects. This approach allows split fragments to reassemble naturally and handles multiple concatenated objects arriving in a single chunk.
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