Tricky ConvertTo-Json in Powershell

ConvertTo-JSON is very useful for generating any runtime value into JSON format.

For example, the following code convert an array into JSON format:

# save the to json format
$list = @(
    "Apple",
    "Banana"
)

$list | ConvertTo-Json

And the output will look like this:

 [
    "Apple",
    "Banana"
]

But, there is a catch on the following situation where it does not convert the array into JSON format. Instead, it just returns a string.


 $trick = @(
    "Coconut"
)

$trick | ConvertTo-Json

And the output will look like this:

"Coconut"

This is not a mistake of the above code. Instead, the correct code should look like the following:

ConvertTo-Json -InputObject $trick

Output:

[
    "Coconut"
]


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