Question

The Facebook graph API’s return to me the user’s email address as

foo\u0040bar.com.

in a JSON object. I need to convert it to

[e-mail].

There must be a built in method in .NET that changes the Unicode character expression (\u1234) to the actual unicode symbol.

Do you know what it is?

Note: I prefer not to use JSON.NET or JavaScriptSerializer for performance issues.

I think the problem is in my StreamReader:

        requestUrl = "https://graph.facebook.com/me?access_token=" + accessToken;
        request = WebRequest.Create(requestUrl) as HttpWebRequest;
        try
        {
            using (HttpWebResponse response2 = request.GetResponse() as HttpWebResponse)
            {
                // Get the response stream  
                reader = new StreamReader(response2.GetResponseStream(),System.Text.Encoding.UTF8);
                string json = reader.ReadToEnd();

I tried different encodings for the StreamReader, UTF8, UTF7, Unicode, … none worked.

Many thanks!

Thanks to L.B for correcting me. The problem was not in the StreamReader.

Answer 1

Json responses are not binary data to convert to a string using some encodings. Instead they are strings correctly decoded by your browser or by HttpWebResponse as in your example. You need a second procesing on it(regex, deserializers etc) to get the final data.

See what you get with
webClient.DownloadString("https://graph.facebook.com/HavelVaclav?access_token=????") without any encoding

{"id":"100000042150992",
    "name":"Havel V\u00e1clav",
    "first_name":"Havel",
    "last_name":"V\u00e1clav",
    "link":"http:\/\/www.facebook.com\/havel.vaclav",
    "username":"havel.vaclav",
    "gender":"male",
    "locale":"cs_CZ"
}

Would your encoding change \/ to /?

So, the problem is not in your StreamReader.