dask - read_json into dataframe ValueError - dask

Question

A minimal example here: I have a json file xaa.json whose contents looks like this (two rows from stackoverflow archive):
[
{"Id": 11, "Body": "<p>Given a specific <code>DateTime</code> value", "Title": "Calculate relative time in C#", "Comments": "There is the .net package https://github.com/NickStrupat/TimeAgo which pretty much does what is being asked."},
{"Id": 7888, "Body": "<p>You need to use an <code>ifstream</code> if you just want to read (use an <code>ofstream</code> to write, or an <code>fstream</code> for both).</p>
<p>To open a file in text mode, do the following:</p>
<pre><code>ifstream in(\\"filename.ext\\", ios_base::in); // the in flag is optional
</code></pre>
<p>To open a file in binary mode, you just need to add the \\"binary\\" flag.</p>
<pre><code>ifstream in2(\\"filename2.ext\\", ios_base::in | ios_base::binary );
</code></pre>
<p>Use the <code>ifstream.read()</code> function to read a block of characters (in binary or text mode). Use the <code>getline()</code> function (it's global) to read an entire line.</p>
", "Title": null, "Comments": "+1 for noting that the global getline() function is to be used instead of the member function."}
]
I want to load such json files into a dask dataframe. I use:
so_posts_df = dd.read_json('./xaa.json', orient='columns').compute()
I get this error:
ValueError: Unexpected character found when decoding object value
After looking into the contents, I figured that the "\\"' stuff was causing it. So, when I removed them, (the editor - IntelliJ said it was clean and nice looking JSON) and when I ran the same read_json, it was able to read into a df and display them nicely.
So, I have 2 questions: (a) what are the values for the read_json argument "errors" ? (b) How can I properly preprocess the json file before reading into dask dataframe? The presence of double-quotes and the double-escaping seems to be causing an issue.
[This may not be a dask issue at all...]...

Answer 1

This also fails with pandas.read_json. I recommend first trying to get things to work well with Pandas, and then try the same workload with dask dataframe. You will likely get much better support when asking Pandas questions.