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Deserializing JSON string with unescaped double quotes

How do I deserialize JSON that has unescaped double quotes in C#?

JSON string example:

{
 "Id": "4c8e6419-f094-48a0-94f8-752ccd7f0354",
 "Description": "Anastasia Sfeir is a Mexican actress, singer, and model. She is best known for her roles in the telenovelas "La que no podia amar" and "Lo que la vida me robo"."
}

the JSON string exactly looks like this:

string json = "n{n "Id": "78d4f53a-8614-4096-ace9-72a62dbcdbc3",n "Description": "100 Thieves is an esports organization and lifestyle brand founded in 2016 by Matthew "Nadeshot" Haag."n}n";

I’m getting exceptions, but once I removed the quotes, it worked.

result = System.Text.Json.JsonSerializer.Deserialize<Description>(response);

I have no control over the response, so I hope there is an easy built-in way to handle this.

Tags:

4

Answers


  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    Inspired by @Serge answer, I devised this method to clean the description. Since this JSON is a reply from an AI chatbot, so sometimes it's not 100% correct, which will cause a loss of money for the tokens used...

         static string FixAndDeserializeJson(string json)
        {
            try
            {
                // Extract the 'Description' value using a regular expression.
                var descriptionPattern = @"""Description"":s*""(.*?)""";
                var match = Regex.Match(json, descriptionPattern);

                if (match.Success)
                {
                    // Get the matched group which contains the description
                    var descriptionValue = match.Groups[1].Value;

                    // Decode Unicode characters and remove backslashes and quotes
                    var fixedDescription = DecodeEncodedNonAsciiCharacters(descriptionValue)
                        .Replace("\", "").Replace(""", "");

                    // Replace the old description with the fixed one in the original JSON string
                    var fixedJson = Regex.Replace(json, descriptionPattern, $""Description": "{fixedDescription}"");

                    // Validate the fixed JSON by attempting to parse it.
                    JToken.Parse(fixedJson);

                    // If parsing is successful, return the fixed JSON
                    return fixedJson;
                }
                else
                {
                    // If the description isn't found, the JSON is likely invalid or not in the expected format
                    return null;
                }
            }
            catch (Exception)
            {
                // If parsing throws an exception at any point, the JSON is invalid; return null
                return null;
            }
        }


        static string DecodeEncodedNonAsciiCharacters(string value)
        {
            return Regex.Replace(
                value,
                @"\u(?<Value>[a-fA-F0-9]{4})",
                m => {
                    return ((char)int.Parse(m.Groups["Value"].Value, System.Globalization.NumberStyles.HexNumber)).ToString();
                });
        }

  2. 0

    The example JSON payload you provided doesn’t have double quotes. Quotes inside of a JSON string are escaped with a backslash (eg: "). If your string example is exactly how the website is returning it, then that is not valid JSON and cannot be read by a regular JSON parsing library.

    If the example string had escaped quotes, it would work fine without any modifications. The issue is with the string you’re trying to parse.|

    Example of valid JSON with escaped quotation marks:

    {
 "Id": "4c8e6419-f094-48a0-94f8-752ccd7f0354",
 "Description": "Anastasia Sfeir is a Mexican actress, singer, and model. She is best known for her roles in the telenovelas "La que no podia amar" and "Lo que la vida me robo"."
}
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  3. 0

    Use postman to call the API manually first, and see if the response is valid.

    Another issue is the JSON string exactly looks like this:. How did you see the json string? Through debugger?

    I'm getting exceptions – what exceptions? Provide debug detail.

    How did you get the HttpResponse? And how did you read it into a string? Provide codes, so we can help you.

    Login or Signup to reply.
  4. 0

    if all your json strings are have only 2 properties Id and Description, you can try to fix your json string using this code

    var desc = ""Description":";
var firstIndex = json.IndexOf(desc) + desc.Length + 1;
var lastIndex=json.LastIndexOf(""") + 1;
        
json = json.Replace( json[firstIndex..lastIndex],JsonConvert.SerializeObject(json[(firstIndex+1)..(lastIndex-1)]));
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