How to get rid of the outer array "[" and "]" in the result file after a CSV to JSON pipeline in ADF?

Hi there,

Hope someone can help me on such a frustrating thing I am having on ADF where I have followed the blog below 100% (I hope) , yet the result JSON file keeps getting an outer array tag as the first "[" and last character "]" --- see first image below to illustrate the array element I want to remove entirely.

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/fasttrack-for-azure/how-to-convert-csv-file-into-array-of-jsons-in-adf/ba-p/3574859

So all I need to know is how can I easily remove the first "[" and last "]" from the json stream as looking at the link above, showing this scenario they did not seem to get the "outer array" elements so I am very confused ;-(

My structure / pipeline is similar to what the link above says (with the "dummy" column for grouping later and an "array" column called "records"

I have done the group by and aggregate exactly as the blog above says:

And the SELECT below does not include the "dummy" column just like the post suggested:

And the sink is just sending through the JSON

And after running the pipeline the outer array element never seems to go away. I have tried some array functions and even to "stringify" the data and then do something like they describe below, but still no luck

i.e. substringIndex(substringIndex(records, '[', -2),']',2)

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/1020768/adf-how-to-remove-the-square-bracket-from-json-as

Can someone please guide me with the best / easiest way to do a simple removal of the first "[" and last "]" in the result JSON file?

I know one could get into some Python code / notebook and do a json.dumps() etc but in this instance would prefer to keep it a simple pipeline like above.

Thanks so much for the help

Lynton