converting \u0040 to @ in C#

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

[email protected].

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

Yes, there is some built in method for that, but that would involve something like using a compiler to parse the string as code...

Use a simple replace:

s = s.Replace(@"\u0040", "@");

For a more flexible solution, you can use a regular expression that can handle any unicode character:

s = Regex.Replace(s, @"\\u([\dA-Fa-f]{4})", v => ((char)Convert.ToInt32(v.Groups[1].Value, 16)).ToString());