Very common struggle, but a great way to prevent that is prefilling the assistant response with "{" or as much JSON output as you're going to know ahead of time like '{"response": ['
Just to be clear for anyone reading this, the optimal way to do this is schema enforced inference. You can only get a parsable response. There are failure modes, but you don't have to mess with parsing at all.
It'll force a response that begins with an open bracket. So if you might need a response with a tool call that doesn't start with "{", then it might not fit your workflow.
