extracting key value pair

Question

I am working on Rest api. It is working fine. When i request it, it sends me a response. Actually this response is an array consisting of sub array and further key:value pairs in them. Now i want to extract these key:value pairs in C#. I thought of regex to extract substring but i have no knowledge of regex yet. but i tried to first get the sub array like.

Input string is

[
  {
    "id": "1",
    "name": "kashif",
    "father_name": "mirza",
    "contact": "21321",
    "email": "sdf",
    "image": "sdfsdf"
  },
  {
    "id": "2",
    "name": "Kashif",
    "father_name": "Mirza",
    "contact": "0342809211",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "image": "photo[1].jpg"
  },
  {
    "id": "3",
    "name": "Abdussadiq",
    "father_name": "Abdul Haq Khan",
    "contact": "03449066113",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "image": "1393602_698558840157121_1872079026_n.jpg"
  }
]

C# code for regex

 Match match = Regex.Match(input, @"(?<=\{)(.*)(?=\})",
        RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
if (match.Success)
    {

        foreach(var matchgroup in match.Groups)
            Console.WriteLine(matchgroup);
    }

It returns me the result but not according to my needs. It returns me like

    "id": "1",
    "name": "kashif",
    "father_name": "mirza",
    "contact": "21321",
    "email": "sdf",
    "image": "sdfsdf"
  },
  {
    "id": "2",
    "name": "Kashif",
    "father_name": "Mirza",
    "contact": "0342809211",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "image": "photo[1].jpg"
  },
  {
    "id": "3",
    "name": "Abdussadiq",
    "father_name": "Abdul Haq Khan",
    "contact": "03449066113",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "image": "1393602_698558840157121_1872079026_n.jpg"

So that means it is removing the the just outer brackets but not the inner ones.

So my questions are:

1. What i am doing wrong in above code?
2. If i have to get key:value pair then what else i need to do?

Answer 1

You don't have to use regex for that.
The data you're trying to parse are in JSON format.

For example, you could parse it with Json.NET

Dictionary<string, dynamic> MyData = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Dictionary<string, dynamic>>(JsonData);

If you want a native support, try JavascriptSerializer (it also gives you an example of how to parse it directly into classes, which is better than dictionary regarding on your JSON data structure)

Dictionary<string, dynamic> MyData = JavaScriptSerializer.Deserialize<Dictionary<string, dynamic>>(JsonData);