Yes, it needs to be on a single line. Spark (or Hadoop really) treats newlines as a record separator by default. While it is possible to use a different string as a record separator, what would you use in the case of JSON?
If you do some Googling I suspect you'll find some possible solutions. Personally, I would just use a separate JSON library (e.g. json4s) to parse this metadata into an object, rather than trying to read it in through Spark. -- Daniel Siegmann Senior Software Engineer *SecurityScorecard Inc.* 214 W 29th Street, 5th Floor New York, NY 10001