struggling to parse an object using jsonlines
jsonlines.Reader accepts iterable as an arg ("The first argument must be an iterable that yields JSON encoded strings" not json-encoded single string as in your example), but, after .decode("utf-8"), log would be a string, which happen to support iterable interface. So when reader calls under the hood next(log) it will get first item of a log string, i.e. character { and will try to process it as an json-line which would be obviously invalid. Try log = log.split() before passing log to the Reader.