Remove JSON object properties that match regular expression in PowerShell

Question

Given an example json object like:

{
  "Id": 1,
  "Name": "Pablo",
  "UnwantedProperty1XOXO": true,
  "UnwantedProperty2XOXO": false,
  ...
}

I want to remove every property that ends in XOXO (so the regex would be something like /.+XOXO$).

How can I remove all the properties with names that match a regular expression with PowerShell? (either with a JSON object or PowerShell object)

I can remove properties from a PowerShell object like this but it doesn't seem to work with a regular expressions: $myObject.PSObject.Properties.Remove("someProperty")

mklement0 · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-11 17:04:26Z

3

The most robust solution is not to use regex-based text parsing, which is brittle (a property-value pair may be spread across multiple lines, a value may accidentally match a property name to exclude).

Instead:

Use ConvertFrom-Json to perform proper JSON parsing into custom objects ([pscustomobject] instances) ...
... and then use Select-Object -Exclude with a wildcard pattern to exclude the properties of non-interest ...
... and convert back to JSON with ConvertTo-Json, if needed.

Get-Content -Raw file.json |
  ConvertFrom-Json |
    Select-Object * -ExcludeProperty *XOXO |
      ConvertTo-Json

^{Note: The [-Property] * argument passed to Select-Object is only required in Windows PowerShell; PowerShell Core sensibly assumes -Property * when only -ExcludeProperty is specified.}

edited Jul 11, 2019 at 17:04

answered Jul 10, 2019 at 23:49

mklement0

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trebleCode · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-10 19:08:24Z

2

You can import the content of the file with Get-Content and then use the built in regex operators to do this.

$data = Get-Content C:\Users\U394282\Desktop\test.json

We want to set $unwantedProps to an array (in this example it's using the @() symbol to encapsulate the results, and so it always has a .Count property

$unwantedProps = @($data | ? { $_ -match 'XOXO'})

if($unwantedProps.Count -gt 0)
{
    $cleanedData = $data -notmatch 'XOXO'    
    return $cleanedData
}
else {
    return
}

Depending on the structure of the JSON file and what index position gets removed as a result, you might also want to have a helper function that will check if the very last item has a comma, making the JSON invalid:

answered Jul 10, 2019 at 19:08

trebleCode

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