title: Writing a Large JSON Array To File
body: <p>I am working on a process that will likely end up attempting to serialize very large json arrays to file.  So loading up the entire array in memory and just dumping to file won't work.  I need to stream the individual items to file to avoid out of memory issues.</p>
  
  <p>Surprisingly, I can't find any examples of doing this.  The code snippet below is something I've cobbled together.  Is there a better way to do this?</p>
  
  <pre><code>first_item = True
  with open('big_json_array.json', 'w') as out:
       out.write('[')
       for item in some_very_big_iterator:
            if first_item:
                 out.write(json.dumps(item))
                 first_item = False
            else:
                 out.write("," + json.dumps(item))
       out.write("]")
  </code></pre>