JSONL is one JSON value per line, no enclosing array brackets. Each line stands alone — readable and writable in streaming fashion without buffering the whole file. Used by BigQuery, ClickHouse, fluentd, OpenAI fine-tuning, LangChain training data, and most modern data pipelines. Also called NDJSON. The line break IS the record separator.
How to open
Any text editor displays JSONL as plain text. `jq` processes it line-by-line: `cat data.jsonl | jq .name`. Convert to JSON for tools that expect a single document.