[powershell] Catching FULL exception message

Consider:

Invoke-WebRequest $sumoApiURL -Headers @{"Content-Type"= "application/json"} -Credential $cred -WebSession $webRequestSession -Method post -Body $sumojson -ErrorAction Stop

This throws the following exception:

How can I catch it entirely or at least filter out the "A resource with the same name already exist."?

Using $_.Exception.GetType().FullName yields

System.Net.WebException

and $_.Exception.Message gives

The remote server returned an error: (400) Bad Request.

I keep coming back to these questions trying to figure out where exactly the data I'm interested in is buried in what is truly a monolithic ErrorRecord structure. Almost all answers give piecemeal instructions on how to pull certain bits of data.

But I've found it immensely helpful to dump the entire object with ConvertTo-Json so that I can visually see LITERALLY EVERYTHING in a comprehensible layout.

    try {
        Invoke-WebRequest...
    }
    catch {
        Write-Host ($_ | ConvertTo-Json)
    }

Use ConvertTo-Json's -Depth parameter to expand deeper values, but use extreme caution going past the default depth of 2 :P

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsoft.powershell.utility/convertto-json

I found it!

Simply print out $Error[0] for the last error message.

You can add:

-ErrorVariable errvar

And then look in $errvar.

The following worked well for me

try {
    asdf
} catch {
    $string_err = $_ | Out-String
}

write-host $string_err

The result of this is the following as a string instead of an ErrorRecord object

asdf : The term 'asdf' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again.
At C:\Users\TASaif\Desktop\tmp\catch_exceptions.ps1:2 char:5
+     asdf
+     ~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : ObjectNotFound: (asdf:String) [], CommandNotFoundException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException