Question

i am facing a problem where i try to communicate with a Ruby API from a C# application.

I need to POST some JSON data, with the parameter name “data” but the API return me: ‘!! Unexpected error while processing request: invalid %-encoding’.

I tried with Content-Type set to ‘application/json’ and ‘application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8’.

My POST data look like this ‘data=some_json_string’.

I figure i should escape the json string, so if it is my problem, how to do it with .NET without using a 3rd party library?

Code:

        byte[] data = System.Text.ASCIIEncoding.UTF8.GetBytes(sdata);

        HttpWebRequest request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(new Uri(url, UriKind.Absolute));

        request.Method = "POST";
        request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8";
        request.ContentLength = data.Length;

        Stream reqStream = request.GetRequestStream();

        // Send the data.
        reqStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
        reqStream.Close();

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Presuming the string sdata coming in is already in JSON format you could do:

using (WebClient wc = new WebClient())
{
    string uri = "http://www.somewhere.com/somemethod";
    string parameters = "data=" + Uri.EscapeDataString(sdata);
    wc.Headers["Content-type"] = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
    string result = wc.UploadString(uri, parameters);
}

Depending on the consuming service it may need the Content-type set to application/json?