Easiest way to *not* output a dash from unset capture output

Help!
1

We are using a custom log capture format (JSON) and have quite a few captures in place.

What’s the easiest and most performant way to output a blank string instead of the capture string if it wasn’t set?

Specifically, we have a custom log format with this in it:

          "user-agent"  :"%[capture.req.hdr(0),json(utf8s)]",
          "referer"     :"%[capture.req.hdr(1),json(utf8s)]",
          "api-key"     :"%[capture.req.hdr(2),json(utf8s)]",

but if the respective headers weren’t set we get a dash - as the capture output.

I’d rather see just a blank field. What’s the easiest way to rewrite these captures to get a blank value instead?

2

Considering that the capture request header documentation claims:

Non-existent headers will be logged just as an empty string.

I would consider this a bug and suggest you file it on github:

Maybe someone has a workaround, I don’t see any obvious one though.

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3

Huh! I knew the capture cookie “no value” was a - but didn’t realise it wasn’t supposed to be the same.

I’ll test on latest and then see.

4

I ran it through a pretty recent build from master yesterday, so I think it’s not solved already.

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