Unflatten

Purpose

<result> = unflatten(<source-tree>, <key-separator-character>);

This function unflattens keys in a JSON object. It provides a way to expand dot-separated fields.

It allows for instance to produce this:

{ "source": { "ip": "1.2.3.4", "port": 443 } }

from this source data:

{ "source.ip": "1.2.3.4", "source.port": 443 }

Example

Here is a sample use case:

module(load="fmunflatten")

# Say you have the following tree, obtained for instance with mmnormalize.
set $!source.ip = "1.2.3.4";
set $!source.bytes = 3258;
set $!source.geo.country_iso_code = "FR";
set $!destination.ip = "4.3.2.1";

# Now unflatten the keys in the $! tree.
set $.unflatten = unflatten($!, ".");

# You may do this to set back safely the result in $! because the function could
# return a default dummy value of 0 (rsyslog number) if $! was not touched (it
# would evaluate to an empty rsyslog string, which is not a JSON datatype).
if (script_error() == 0) then {
    unset $!;
    set $! = $.unflatten;
    unset $.unflatten;
}

An output of $! would give this, in pretty-print:

{
  "source": {
    "ip": "1.2.3.4",
    "bytes": 3258,
    "geo": {
      "country_iso_code": "FR"
    }
  },
  "destination": {
    "ip": "4.3.2.1"
  }
}

See also

Help with configuring/using Rsyslog:

See also

Contributing to Rsyslog:

Copyright 2008-2023 Rainer Gerhards (Großrinderfeld), and Others.