ConvertFrom-Json should have option to produce hashtables instead of objects

Json is very convenient to glue tools together.
For example, both python and powershell have ability to serialize and de-serialize anything into json without a schema.
Unfortunately, after de-serialization from json in PowerShell, you get immutable objects.
If you just get mutable hashtables, life would be much better: i.e. you can create some object in python, toss it to powershell, enhance with some info and inspect the complete result.

One of the date points about a similar request: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3740128/pscustomobject-to-hashtable

It's a more generic question, but I think that in context of json it's especially desirable.

In theory, this makes a lot of sense to me.

Although honestly, my biggest problem with json and PowerShell is that it can't ever produce the same json it received, I'm pretty sure this would make that worse unless ConvertTo-Json is fixed first ;-)

Joel Bennett (@Jaykul)

Joel Bennett (@Jaykul) can you provide a specific example?

sergei (@vors)

sergei (@vors): #2448 and #3153 are both examples.

Could you clarify your original point with an example, though? This seems to work fine to me:

PS C:\temp> cat .\foo.txt
{
        "a":1,
        "b":2
}
PS C:\temp> $a = cat .\foo.txt | ConvertFrom-Json
PS C:\temp> $a

a b
- -
1 2


PS C:\temp> $a.b = 3
PS C:\temp> $a

a b
- -
1 3

PS C:\temp> $a | ConvertTo-Json
{
    "a":  1,
    "b":  3
}

Joey Aiello (@joeyaiello)

Joey Aiello (@joeyaiello): Exactly. It seems like I run into one or the other of those every time.
As far as mutability, you missed it ;-)

$user = '{ "name": "Joel", "city":"Rochester" }' | ConvertFrom-Json
$user.name = "Joel Bennett" # sure, that's fine
$user.account = "Jaykul" # nope. Can't add things.

Sorry for long reply time, dropped out of my attention.

Could you clarify your original point with an example, though?

Sure, in your example $a is PsCustomObject, and not a hashtable.
The reason why it's important is because it's very common to enumerate thru the key-value pairs and apply some transformation, or try to find some value. With PSObject instead of hashtable it ever requires some step like https://stackoverflow.com/a/34383413/1355726 or doing some Get-Memeber with NoteProperty, which is pretty obscure way to do it.

Hmm isn't this issue resolved? ConvertFrom-Json -AsHashtable was added in #5043.

Ah indeed, awesome!

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ConvertFrom-Json should have option to produce hashtables instead of objects #3159

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ConvertFrom-Json should have option to produce hashtables instead of objects #3159

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Jaykul commented on Feb 16, 2017

vors commented on Feb 16, 2017

joeyaiello commented on Feb 16, 2017

Jaykul commented on Feb 18, 2017

vors commented on Feb 20, 2018

markekraus commented on Feb 20, 2018

vors commented on Feb 21, 2018

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