Develop Reference

Remove strange hidden charecters from my JSON before deserializing

I have some JSON being sent to me that breaks when it is trying to be deserialized. It seems to contain a black diamond with a ? in it. I cannot see the character but it is obviously there and it is failing on my system.
How do I get rid of this and still leave my JSON intact for deserialization?
UPDATE:
Here is a example of what will be in the middle of my JSON:
"UDF5" : "�65",
I am even open to just removing this property from my JSON altogether via RegEx.

As answered for: remove piece of string (JSON string ) with regex and based on the formatting you provide in that question (and I am assuming will edit into this one):
Assuming I can rely on the formatting you show above and it is one of these per regex being run this can be accomplished as simply as something like
([\S\s]*\"])\"UDF5\" : \"[\S\s]*?\",([\S\s]*)
Using the back reference $1$2 referencing the parts before and after the UDF5 field to write back out.
If there is a newline there to remove I am not doing it right now. This could be better - if someone else has time to correct or provide an additional answer. But in the interests of getting you an emergency fix I hope this helps.

Regular expression to get the Name from URL link

I have a Hyperlink field (aka column) in SharePoint 2010.
Say it's called SalesReportUrl. The url looks like:
http://portal.cab.com/SalessiteCollection/October2012Library/Forms/customview.aspx
The hyperlink field stores values in two fields (the link and description).
What would be the RegEx if I want to get the October2012Library out of the Url?
I tried this but it's definitely not working:
#"<a[\s]+[^>]*?href[\s]?=[\s\"\']+(.*?)[\"\']+.*?>([^<]+|.*?)?<\/a>";
I also tried:
^(.*?/)?Forms/$
but no luck.
I think sharepoint stores hyperlink like this:
http://portal.cab.com/SalessiteCollection/October2012Library/Forms/customview.aspx, some description
Looks like this has a solution. but what's the syntax substring get the list or library name ?https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/40712/get-list-title-in-sharepoint-designer-workflow

How about this (as Daniel suggested) :
string url = #"http://portal.cab.com/SalessiteCollection/October2012Library/Forms/customview.aspx";
Uri uri = new Uri(url);
if(uri.Segments.Length > 2))
Console.WriteLine(uri.Segments[2]); // will output "October2012Library/"
you can add .Replace("/", string.Empty) if you want to get rid of the "/"
Console.WriteLine(uri.Segments[2].Replace("/", string.Empty));

http://[^/]+/[^/]+/([^/]+)/
match's group[1] is the value you need. it gets the 3rd part (divided by /) in the url. if you need make sure it is followed by other parts, i.e. forms, add it at the end.

try using this new RegEx("SalessiteCollection/(.+?)/Forms").match(<urlString>).groups[1].value
Though it is a rough answer, you might have to make few corrections but I hope you understand what I am trying to explain.

maybe this?
http:\/\/([a-zA-Z0-9]([a-zA-Z0-9\-]{0,61}[a-zA-Z0-9])?\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,6}\/[a-zA-Z]*\/([a-zA-Z0-9]*)\/
http://rubular.com/r/LuuuORPRXt

C# string.Split() Matching Both Slashes?

I've got a .NET 3.5 web application written in C# doing some URL rewriting that includes a file path, and I'm running into a problem. When I call string.Split('/') it matches both '/' and '\' characters. Is that... supposed to happen? I assumed that it would notice that the ASCII values were different and skip it, but it appears that I'm wrong.
// url = 'someserver.com/user/token/files\subdir\file.jpg
string[] buffer = url.Split('/');
The above code gives a string[] with 6 elements in it... which seems counter intuitive. Is there a way to force Split() to match ONLY the forward slash? Right now I'm lucky, since the offending slashes are at the end of the URL, I can just concatenate the rest of the elements in the string[], but it's a lot of work for what we're doing, and not a great solution to the underlying problem.
Anyone run into this before? Have a simple answer? I appreciate it!
More Code:
url = HttpContext.Current.Request.Path.Replace("http://", "");
string[] buffer = url.Split('/');
Turns out, Request.Path and Request.RawUrl are both changing my slashes, which is ridiculous. So, time to research that a bit more and figure out how to get the URL from a function that doesn't break my formatting. Thanks everyone for playing along with my insanity, sorry it was a misleading question!

When I try the following:
string url = #"someserver.com/user/token/files\subdir\file.jpg";
string[] buffer = url.Split('/');
Console.WriteLine(buffer.Length);
... I get 4. Post more code.

Something else is happening, paste more code.
string str = "a\\b/c\\d";
string[] ts = str.Split('/');
foreach (string t in ts)
{
Console.WriteLine(t);
}
outputs
a\b
c\d
just like it should.
My guess is that you are converting / into \ somewhere.

You could use regex to convert all \ slashes to a temp char, split on /, then regex the temp chars back to \. Pain in the butt, but one option.

I suspect (without seeing your whole application) that the problem lies in the semantics of path delimiters in URLs. It sounds like you are trying to attach a semantic value to backslashes within your application that is contrary to the way HTTP protocols define and use backslashes.
This is just a guess, of course.
The best way to solve this problem might be modifying the application to encode the path in some other way (such as "%5C" for backslashes, maybe?).

those two functions are probably converting \ to / because \ is not a valid character in a URL (see Which characters make a URL invalid?). The browser (NOT C#, as you are inferring) is assuming that when you are using that invalid character, you mean /, so it is "fixing" it for you. If you want \ in your URL, you need to encode it first.
The browsers themselves are actually the ones that make that change in the request, even if it is behind the scenes. To verify this, just turn on fiddler and look at the URLs that are actually getting sent when you go to a URL like this. IE and Chrome actually change the \ to / in the URL field on the browser itself, FireFox doesn't, but the request goes through that way anyways.

Update:
How about this:
Regex.Split(url, "/");

How do I use a pattern Url to extract a segment from an actual Url?

If I have a series of "pattern" Urls of the form:
http://{username}.sitename.com/
http://{username}.othersite.net/
http://mysite.com/{username}
and I have an actual Url of the form:
http://joesmith.sitename.com/
Is there any way that I can match a pattern Url and in turn use it to extract the username portion out the actual Url? I've thought of nasty ways to do it, but it just seems like there should be a more intuitive way to accomplish this.
ASP.NET MVC uses a similar approach to extract the various segments of the URL when it is building its routes. Given the example:
{controller}/{action}
So given the Url of the form, Home/Index, it knows that it is the Home controller calling the Index action method.

Not sure I understand this question correctly but you can just use a regular expression to match anything between 'http://' and the first dot.

A very simple regex will do:
':https?://([a-z0-9\.-]*[a-z0-9])\.sitename\.com'
This will allow any subdomain that only contains valid subdomain characters. Example of allowed subdomains:
joesmith.sitename.com
joe.smith.sitename.com
joe-smith.sitename.com
a-very-long-subdomain.sitename.com
As you can see, you might want to complicate the regex slightly. For instance, you could limit it to only allow a certain amount of characters in the subdomain.

It seems the the quickest and easiest solution is going off of Machine's answer.
var givenUri = "http://joesmith.sitename.com/";
var patternUri = "http://{username}.sitename.com/";
patternUri = patternUri.Replace("{username}", #"([a-z0-9\.-]*[a-z0-9]");
var result = Regex.Match(givenUri, patternUri, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase).Groups;
if(!String.IsNullOrEmpty(result[1].Value))
return result[1].Value;
Seems to work great.

Well, this "pattern URL" is a format you've made up, right? You basically you'll just need to process it.
If the format of it is:
anything inside "{ }" is a thing to capture, everything else must be as is
Then you'd just find the start/end index of those brackets, and match everything else. Then when you get to a place where one is, make sure you only look for chars such that they don't match whatever 'token' comes after the next ending '}'.

There are definitely different ways - ultimately though your server must be configured to handle (and possibly route) these different subdomain requests.
What I would do would be to answer all subdomain requests (except maybe some reserved words, like 'www', 'mail', etc.) on sitename.com with a single handler or page (I'm assuming ASP.NET here based on your C# tag).
I'd use the request path, which is easy enough to get, with some simple string parsing/regex routines (remove the 'http://', grab the first token up until '.' or '/' or '\', etc.) and then use that in a session, making sure to observe URL changes.
Alternately, you could map certain virtual paths to request urls ('joesmith.sitename.com' => 'sitename.com/index.aspx?username=joesmith') via IIS but that's kind of nasty too.
Hope this helps!

What's wrong with my url encoding?

In my asp.net mvc application I created the following link:
http://localhost:2689/en/Formula.mvc/351702++LYS+GRONN+5G+9%252f2++fds
I get error 400 (bad request).
I think it blocks at the %25 (forward slash).
What am I doing wrong?
--EDIT 3--
I tried not encoding anything at all but rather rely on the default encoding of Url.RouteUrl().
It seems that this doesn't encode the "/" for some reason.
If I encode it myself first, I end up with the doubel encoded %252f. This gives me a bad request for some reason..
Why?!
--EDIT 2--
I generated the last part of the URI as follows:
Take the id.toString
Take the HttpUtility.UrlEncode(name)
Take the HttpUtility.UrlEncode(code)
String.Format("{0}--{1}--{2}") with the values from the previous parts
Add it as a parameter to Url.RouteUrl()
After that my action gets this parameter again, splits it at -- and HttpUtility.Decode() the values back.
I do it this way because the two last parameters are optional, but functional parameters. IF they are defined in a previous step, they have to be carried along to the other pages.
Less abstract: A color can have multiple names, but if a user selected it by a particular name, it should be kept throughout all the other pages.
--EDIT 1--
It also looks like HttpUtility.UrlEncode() and Url.Encode() return different results :S
If I don't encode the "/", it acts as a separator=>no luck there.
If I encode it with Url.Encode() I end up with %2F => Code 400
If I encode it with HttpUtility.UrlEncode() I end up with %25 => code 400
Because 400 doesn't even let it through to asp.net-mvc, the route debugger is of no use :(

I was there a couple of days ago. If you can accept unreadable route-values in the URL try this:
URL-encoded slash in URL

%25 is actually encoded "%", so %252f is encoded "%2f".
%2f (encoded "/") is not allowed in URL unless you explicitly allow it in webserver's configuration.

Have you run the Routing debugger: http://haacked.com/archive/2008/03/13/url-routing-debugger.aspx

I haven't looked too much at the encoding - but note that if this is to be stored somewhere (or acted upon in some way), then a POST would be more appropriate. If the text on the right is actually representative of the data with id 351702 (a vanity url, much like /665354/whats-wrong-with-my-url-encoding), then you should humanize the text. Much as the spaces have been removed from the above. It is also common to have this as a separate level in the route that is simply discarded.
Generally, MVC urls should be comprehensible.

W3Schools works fine: http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/html_form_submit.asp?text=hello/world
Here's the URL encoding reference: http://www.w3schools.com/TAGS/ref_urlencode.asp

You can't use a forward slash as a value in the URL. Here is a nice post about creating browser and SEO friendly URLS => http://www.dominicpettifer.co.uk/displayBlog.aspx?id=34
[Edit]
Whenever you create a route you associate it with a URL pattern (The default pattern is {controller}/{action}/{id}). And in this url pattern you are supposed to use the forward slash to separate different tokens. Hope that helps