Empty array in config json file results in null class property

Describe the bug

Empty array in config json file results in null class property

To Reproduce

appsettings.json

{
  "nullValue": null,
  "anEmptyArray": [],
  "ridiculousWorkaround": ["this string has to not be empty"]
}

Startup.cs (ConfigureServices method)

var nullValue = Configuration.GetSection("nullValue").Get<IEnumerable<string>>();
var values = Configuration.GetSection("anEmptyArray").Get<IEnumerable<string>>();
var workaround = Configuration.GetSection("ridiculousWorkaround").Get<IEnumerable<string>>();

// nullValue is null
// values is null
// workaround is List<string> length 1

Expected behavior

in the above example, ‘nullValue’ would be null, ‘values’ should be an empty enumerable, and ‘workaround’ should be an enumerable with 1 value.

Additional context

There was an issue filed about this that was closed, but the issue was not fixed. https://github.com/aspnet/Configuration/issues/788

[andre-ss6]

At least it should work with empty arrays. From what I read on the original issue, the problem is that you check for a key and if it doesn’t exist, null is returned, thus you don’t know when it’s really null or when it simply doesn’t exist.

However, I don’t understand why empty arrays suffer from that problem. [] is not the same as null. If your code is treating those two as the same, I think that’s a bug.

[analogrelay]

Filed https://github.com/dotnet/extensions/issues/3083