Remove characters inside expression Powershell - powershell

Question

I'm trying to remove characters from an expression, without the option to define another integer.
This is the expression I currently have:
Get-ADUser -Identity $PSItem -Properties mail, manager, l, title |
Select-Object -Property Name, SamAccountName, Mail, l, title, #{
Name = "ManagerGID"
Expression = { (Get-Aduser -identity $psitem.manager).samaccountname }
},
#{
Name = "ManagerName"
Expression = { (Get-Aduser -identity $psitem.manager).name }
},
#{
Name = "PicURL"
Expression = {
(ConvertFrom-Json -InputObject (Invoke-WebRequest ('http://picasaweb.google.com/data/entry/api/user/' + $psitem.mail + '?alt=json')) |
Select-Object -ExpandProperty entry |
Select-Object -ExpandProperty 'gphoto$thumbnail')
}
}
For the PicURL option, the results from google for the gphoto$thumbnail will be something similar to this:
#{$t=https://lh3.googleusercontent.com***********.jpg}
I would like to remove the #{$t= and the } in the start and end of the property. Unfortunately, couldn't find a proper way to do that without having to take out this expression from the pipeline, which is not very effective for the rest of the code.
If you're curious, this is for automatic org chart creation from AD, with google profile pics included.

Answer 1

The implication of seeing output #{$t=https://lh3.googleusercontent.com***********.jpg} is that your input object's gphoto$thumbnail property value is a custom object with a single property literally named $t, whose value is the URL of interest.[1]
Therefore, you can simply append another Select-Object call to extract the $t property's value:
... | Select-Object -ExpandProperty '$t'
Note the need to single-quote ('...') property name $t, so that it isn't mistaken for a variable reference, the same way that property name gphoto$thumbnail required single-quoting.
Alternatively, in v3+, consolidate the then-three Select-Object -ExpandProperty calls into a single ForEach-Object call:
... | ForEach-Object { $_.entry.'gphoto$thumbnail'.'$tp' }
[1] This hashtable-like representation is what PowerShell uses to stringify [pscustomobject] instances.