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Indeed, this has already been done: http://ndjson.org/

To be fair it's not an objectionable format. Using line breaks to separate objects makes it streamable, and you don't need to enclose the whole thing in an array to make it a valid JSON document.

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That is not quite a CSV replacement. I use it for things with objects and stuff all the time. To be a CSV replacement you really need to add that each line must be a JSON array, and that it can only have scalars in it (no sub-arrays or objects). That would be a decent enough replacement for CSV itself. Not perfect, but the CSV "standard" is already a nightmare at the edge anyhow and honestly a lot of it can't be fixed anyway, so, this is probably as good as it could get.

> that it can only have scalars in it (no sub-arrays or objects)

I see CSV files that contain JSON arrays/objects in their fields all the time. Mainly from exporting Postgres tables that contain json/jsonb-typed columns. Are you saying that these aren't valid CSVs?

They're saying that a CSV equivalent should be strictly 2-dimensional, with "flat" values.

Such a format could contain arbitrary JSON in a "cell", but simply as text, in the same way as putting the same data in a CSV.

These are strings containing JSON

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