Why do I get unexpected ConvertTo-Json
results, why do I get values like System.Collections.Hashtable
and/or why does a round-trip ($Json | ConvertFrom-Json | ConvertTo-Json
) fail?
Meta issue
Stackoverflow has a good mechanism to prevent duplicate questions but as far as I can see there is no mechanism to prevent questions that have a duplicate cause. Take this question as a an example: almost every week a new question comes in with the same cause, yet it is often difficult to define it as a duplicate because the question itself is just a slightly different. Nevertheless, I wouldn't be surprised if this question/answer itself ends up as a duplicate (or off-topic) but unfortunately stackoverflow has no possibility to write an article to prevent other programmers from continuing writing questions caused by this “known” pitfall.
Duplicates
A few examples of similar questions with the same common cause:
- PowerShell ConvertTo-Json does not convert Array as expected (yesterday)
- Powershell ConvertTo-json with embedded hashtable
- powershell “ConvertTo-Json” has messed json format output
- Nested arrays and ConvertTo-Json
- Powershell ConvertTo-JSON missing nested level
- How to save a JSON object to a file using Powershell?
- Cannot convert PSCustomObjects within array back to JSON correctly
- ConvertTo-Json flattens arrays over 3 levels deep
- Add an array of objects to a PSObject at once
- Why does ConvertTo-Json drop values
- How to round-trip this JSON to PSObject and back in Powershell
- Issue with ConvertFrom-Json
- …
Different
So, were does this “self-answered” question differ from the above duplicates?
It has the common cause in the title and with that it might better prevent repeating questions due to the same cause.
Answer
ConvertTo-Json
has a-Depth
parameter:Example
To do a full round-trip with a JSON file you need to increase the
-Depth
for theConvertTo-Json
cmdlet:TL;DR
Probably because
ConvertTo-Json
terminates branches that are deeper than the default-Depth
(2) with a (.Net) full type name, programmers assume a bug or a cmdlet limitation and do not read the help or about.Personally, I think a string with a simple ellipsis (three dots: …) at the end of the cut off branch, would have a clearer meaning (see also: Github issue: 8381)
Why?
This issue often ends up in another discussion as well: Why is the depth limited at all?
Some objects have circular references, meaning that a child object could refer to a parent (or one of its grandparents) causing a infinitive loop if it would be serialized to JSON.
Take for example the following hash table with a
parent
property that refers to the object itself:If you execute:
$Test | ConvertTo-Json
it will conveniently stop at a depth level of 2 by default:This is why it is not a good idea to automatically set the
-Depth
to a large amount.