How to escape specific JSON characters in Powershell - json

Question

Background
I am using PowerShell 7.
Yesterday, I asked this question on help merging some JSON together and saving it, it worked great.
I have now ran into another problem that my new gained knowledge doesn't help with - escaped characters.
Problem
I have some JSON like so:
{
"toolcache": [
{
"name": "Python",
"url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/actions/python-versions/main/versions-manifest.json",
"platform": "linux",
"platform_version": "18.04",
"arch": "x64",
"versions": [
"2.7.*",
"3.6.*",
"3.7.*",
"3.8.*",
"3.9.*",
"3.10.*"
]
}
],
"powershellModules": [
{"name": "MarkdownPS"},
{"name": "Microsoft.Graph"},
{"name": "Pester"},
{"name": "PSScriptAnalyzer"}
]
}
And I try to apply the knowledge in the other post:
### Add to JSON Toolet
# Try to escape characters as plain text using heredoc - Is this is the issue?
$ToolsetsToAdd = #"
{"name": "SqlServer"}
"#
$ToolsetFile = "toolset-2004.json"
$ToolsetObject = $(Get-Content $ToolsetFile -Raw)
$ToolSetSystemObject =$($ToolsetObject | ConvertFrom-Json)
$ToolSetSystemObject.powershellModules += $ToolsetsToAddJson
$ToolSetSystemObject | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 100 | Set-Content $ToolsetFile
And when I run it, I get:
{
"toolcache": [
{
"name": "Python",
"url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/actions/python-versions/main/versions-manifest.json",
"platform": "linux",
"platform_version": "18.04",
"arch": "x64",
"versions": [
"2.7.*",
"3.6.*",
"3.7.*",
"3.8.*",
"3.9.*",
"3.10.*"
]
}
],
"powershellModules": [
{
"name": "MarkdownPS"
},
{
"name": "Microsoft.Graph"
},
{
"name": "Pester"
},
{
"name": "PSScriptAnalyzer"
},
"{\"name\": \"SqlServer\"}"
],
I have tried a variation of escapes using things like `"`" but couldn't figure this one out either.
This to my knowledge is expanded JSON, so I'm not sure its an error, but its not copying and escaping things like I expected. Whether this is avoidable is what I want to find out from someone who knows better!
What I want to do:
Ideally, I'd like a correctly formatted and parsed JSON file like so:
{
"toolcache": [
{
"name": "Python",
"url": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/actions/python-versions/main/versions-manifest.json",
"platform": "linux",
"platform_version": "18.04",
"arch": "x64",
"versions": [
"2.7.*",
"3.6.*",
"3.7.*",
"3.8.*",
"3.9.*",
"3.10.*"
]
}
],
"powershellModules": [
{"name": "MarkdownPS"},
{"name": "Microsoft.Graph"},
{"name": "Pester"},
{"name": "PSScriptAnalyzer"}
{"name": "SqlServer"}
]
}

Answer 1

You are treating the array in $ToolSetSystemObject.powershellModules as if it were an array of strings, but in fact this is an array of objects
To add a new object to it, just do
$ToolSetSystemObject.powershellModules += #{name = "SqlServer"}
or
$ToolSetSystemObject.powershellModules += [PsCustomObject]#{name = "SqlServer"}