title: Reading individual JSON events using Jackson
body: <p>I have a file with several JSON objects, each of which may contain other objects and arrays.</p>
  
  <p>I would like to deserialize this, preferably using the Jackson library, into a data structure that maintains top-level object separation, e.g. an array or a list of Java <code>HashMap&lt;String, String&gt;</code> objects, where each <code>HashMap</code> will contain the data of a single top-level JSON object from the file.</p>
  
  <p>From what I have seen, you can't get a <code>HashMap&lt;String, String&gt;</code> from Jackson, so I have to put up with a <code>HashMap&lt;String, Object&gt;</code>:</p>
  
  <pre><code>List&lt;HashMap&lt;String,Object&gt;&gt; values = new ObjectMapper().readValue(new BufferedReader(new FileReader(path)), new TypeReference&lt;List&lt;HashMap&lt;String, Object&gt;&gt;&gt;() {});
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The deserialization above works as expected, however I get all the file data and a not a single JSON object's data, as I would like.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks!</p>