bash - processing output one line at a time

I read that xargs was good for processing the output of a command one line at a time (and it is). I have the following line in my script.

./gen-data | awk '{printf $2 " "; printf $1=$2=$3=""; gsub (" ", "", $0);if(length($0) == 0){ print "0000"} else{print $0}}' | xargs -t -n2 -P1 bash -c 'datatojson "$@"' _ 

It produces the right output, there is no question of that. However, gen-data produces something like 1000 lines, and what I really would like is for this command to execute after each line, not after 1000 lines (It's clearly stopping regularly to get more input).

Here is what gen-data looks like:

candump $interface & while true; do while read p; do cansend $interface $(echo $p | awk 'NF>1{print $NF}'); done < <(shuf $indoc) done 

(cansend sends data to an interface and candump reads from that interface and outputs it onto the screen, but I wager that's not too relevant). In any case candump seems to be continuously streaming output, but when I pipe that into awk and xargs, it becomes chunked. Is it just because I used shuf? I would think that since it's going through the interface, and being read on the other side, it would be less chunked than shuf provides.