Json string gets escaped in web-api

Question

we have JSON configuration data stored in a database. i need to fetch this JSON data and return it, as it is, to the browser via asp.net web-api:

public class ConfigurationController : ApiController
{
    public string Get(string configId)
    {
        // Get json from database
        // when i return the fetched json it get's escaped
    }
}

The value that i return gets escaped. how do i simply return the string as it is? I really don't want to populate an object that gets serialized to JSON.

Answer 1

You can return a HttpResponseMessage from the ApiController which allows you to basically return a string value.

e.g.

public HttpResponseMessage Get()
{
    return new HttpResponseMessage() { 
        Content = new StringContent("Hello World", System.Text.Encoding.UTF8, "application/json") 
    };
}

What you would want to do is just pass the json string as the StringContent.

Answer 2

The accepted answer is slightly off. The correct version is:

public HttpResponseMessage Get()
{
    return new HttpResponseMessage() { 
        Content = new StringContent("Hello World", System.Text.Encoding.UTF8, "application/json") 
    };
}

It's the StringContent function that correctly removes the escaping. Without the application/json media type, tools like postman won't correctly display the "pretty" version of the result.