There are lots of API's and libraries are present but I prefer to use org.json API suggested by json.org

you can also go for GSON library which is one of the best library for serialize and deserialize Java objects to (and from) JSON.

here's the quick demo of reading above JSON with org.json API.

import org.json.JSONObject;
import org.json.JSONArray;

public class HelloWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String jsonString = "[ { \"name\": \"Andrew\", \"age\": 21, \"parents\": [ { \"name\": \"Joseph\", \"age\": 18 }, { \"name\": \"Joseph\", \"age\": 18 } ] }, { \"name\": \"Maria\", \"age\": 35, \"parents\": [ { \"name\": \"Kassandra\", \"age\": 16 }, { \"name\": \"Abigail\", \"age\": 22 } ] } ]";
        JSONArray json = new JSONArray(jsonString);
        for(int i=0; i<json.length(); i++){
          JSONObject j = json.getJSONObject(i);
          System.out.println(j + "\n------");
        }
    }
}

You can use the below methods to read from a file and convert the JSON array to a List of Questions.

public String readJsonFromFile(String filePath) throws IOException, ParseException {
    String json = Files.readString(Paths.get("file path"));
    return new JSONParser().parse(json).toString();
}


public List<Question> convert(String JsonString) throws JsonMappingException, JsonProcessingException {
        ObjectMapper om = new ObjectMapper();
        CollectionType typeReference =
                TypeFactory.defaultInstance().constructCollectionType(List.class, Question.class);
        List<Question> questions =  om.readValue(JsonString, typeReference);
        return questions;
    }

If your JSON keys and Java class fields are different, use @JsonPropery annotation to map keys to fields

import com.fasterxml.jackson.annotation.JsonProperty;

public class Question {
    

    @JsonProperty("question")
    private String title;
    @JsonProperty("answer 1")
    private String a1;
    @JsonProperty("answer 2")
    private String a2;
    @JsonProperty("answer 3")
    private String a3;
    @JsonProperty("correct answer")
    private String cA;

    //setters & getters
}

Required Jars:
jackson-annotations.jar
jackson-core.jar
jackson-databind.jar
json-simple.jar //used to parse Json file to String

You are asking Jackson to parse a StudentList. Tell it to parse a List (of students) instead. Since List is generic you will typically use a TypeReference

List<Student> participantJsonList = mapper.readValue(jsonString, new TypeReference<List<Student>>(){});

If you want to read two objects as a list into Java, you need to write them as a list as well:

List<Town> towns = new ArrayList<>();
towns.add(townobj);
towns.add(anotherTownobj);

writer.writeValue(out, towns);

When you read that back it becomes a List again.

The output you've shown in your question as not a valid single json file. But using the above method will get you a valid single json file that looks like this:

[
    {
      "p" : {
        "firstName" : "John",
        "amount" : 6860.0,
        "lastName" : "Smith"
      },
      "hello" : "qwiejiowcqnio",
      "number" : 1380.0
    },
    {
      "p" : {
        "firstName" : "Sam",
        "amount" : 623460.0,
        "lastName" : "Smith"
      },
      "hello" : "qwiej2342io",
      "number" : 1330.0
    }
]

The whole file is an array and there are objects and other arrays (e.g. cars) in the whole array of the file.

As you say, the outermost layer of your JSON blob is an array. Therefore, your parser will return a JSONArray. You can then get JSONObjects from the array ...

  JSONArray a = (JSONArray) parser.parse(new FileReader("c:\\exer4-courses.json"));

  for (Object o : a)
  {
    JSONObject person = (JSONObject) o;

    String name = (String) person.get("name");
    System.out.println(name);

    String city = (String) person.get("city");
    System.out.println(city);

    String job = (String) person.get("job");
    System.out.println(job);

    JSONArray cars = (JSONArray) person.get("cars");

    for (Object c : cars)
    {
      System.out.println(c+"");
    }
  }

For reference, see "Example 1" on the json-simple decoding example page.

This is a working example based (and tested) with gson-2.8.0. It accepts an arbitrary sequence of JSON objects on a given input stream. And, of course, it does not impose any restrictions on how you have formatted your input:

       InputStream is = /* whatever */
       Reader r = new InputStreamReader(is, "UTF-8");
       Gson gson = new GsonBuilder().create();
       JsonStreamParser p = new JsonStreamParser(r);

       while (p.hasNext()) {
          JsonElement e = p.next();
          if (e.isJsonObject()) {
              Map m = gson.fromJson(e, Map.class);
              /* do something useful with JSON object .. */
          }
          /* handle other JSON data structures */
       }