This will be a short post on querying REST APIs with Powershell. It’s hard to argue that REST APIs are the predominant technology for interacting with networked services. They provide a gateway for interacting with a 3rd party (or self-hosted) product without having to go through the exercise of a more complicated integration. REST APIs communicate in a common format, typically JSON. However, most will allow us to choose the response format by specifying an option in the ‘Accept’ header.

JSON is a widely used format for representing structured data. Developers like it because it is easy to read, most common languages have a library for interacting with it, and most public APIs accept JSON in HTTP requests. In this post, we’ll look at parsing a JSON file using Go! We will be using the io/ioutil package to open a json file on local disk, and encoding/json to parse the JSON data within the file into a memory structure.