Here's a command-line that parses a json string containing a large array of short strings:

python -c "import simplejson as json; json.loads('[' + '''\"asdfadf\", ''' * 100000000 + '\"asdfasf\"]') "

That works, but if you increase the size a little bit (so the string is > 2^31)

python -c "import simplejson as json; json.loads('[' + '''\"asdfadf\", ''' * 300000000 + '\"asdfasf\"]') "

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/simplejson/__init__.py", line 307, in loads
    return _default_decoder.decode(s)
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/simplejson/decoder.py", line 338, in decode
    raise ValueError(errmsg("Extra data", s, end, len(s)))
ValueError: Extra data: line 1 column -994967285 - line 1 column 3300000011 (char -994967285 - 3300000011)


Here's my version:

$ python
Python 2.6.5 (r265:79063, Oct  1 2012, 22:04:36) 
[GCC 4.4.3] on linux2
>>> import sys;print("%x" % sys.maxsize, sys.maxsize > 2**32)
('7fffffffffffffff', True)


Also note that the test above requires at least 20GB of memory (that's not a bug, just a heads-up).