Powershell to the people series — JSON

Since I posted my last blog, but since I´m working in the university, have two user groups to manage, and a family, it has been sitting back in the queue to write new blogs. There was a request from a person in the PowerPlatform User Group in Iceland that requested to get more details on JSON and how to use Powershell with JSON. We will be using both a JSON file and an online website to invoke rest requests to get more feel.

To start with, we will take a look at how JSON structure is built up.

{
 "name":"apple",
 "color":"green"
}

Here we see a simple way of creating data with apple; we start by opening JSON data with open and close brackets; we add the key and the quotation marks' value. To add new lines, we need to add a comma after each line but not the last line. This is a typical JSON format of data. But if you want to have many keys and values, we can have an array of fruits, as shown in the example below.

{
 "fruits": [
  {"name":"apple","color":"green"},
  {"name":"orange","color":"orange"},
  {"name":"banana","color":"yellow"},
  {"name":"kiwi","color":"brown"}
 ]
}

The only difference is that we set a parent object key name and the array as the key's value and surround that with an angle bracket. We can save this text of the fruits to a file named fruits.json within a folder on c:\fruits\fruits.JSON. From there, we can work with the file. Then we can read the contents of the file by typing in :

$fruits = Get-Content "c:\fruits\fruits.json" | ConvertFrom-Json

We can now see how the data is provided if we import the JSON data into a variable.

Converting text contents to JSON data

But to connect to a website API that contains JSON contents and read it from Powershell, we can use something called Invoke-RestMethod, and from there, we can call API path with a GET method to get data from the API.

(Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -Uri "https://api.chucknorris.io/jokes/random").value

Getting data from API source