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c#jsonjavascriptserializer

JavaScriptSerializer Adding a Question Mark to a Property

I'm running into an odd issue and from looking around I can't seem to find any explanation for what's happening.

I'm trying to serialize some data to JSON in C# as follows:

var transactionJson = new JavaScriptSerializer().Serialize(remoteData);

Most of the time this works, but once in a while there is a question mark character injected into the resulting JSON.

Here's a screenshot of a portion of the data going in

and here is the corresponding JSON that gets generated (note the leading "?" added into the ProvinceCode value):

"Addresses": [{
  "City": "Edmonton",
  "Confidential": null,
  "Country": null,
  "CountryCode": "CA",
  "Line1": "123 Test Dr.",
  "Line2": null,
  "Line3": null,
  "Line4": null,
  "PostalCode": "T5K1P4",
  "Province": null,
  "ProvinceCode": "?ALBERTA",
  "Type": null,
  "TypeCode": "H"
}],

Does anyone have idea why that extra character is being injected into the value? Looking at the raw data, I'm not seeing any special characters in that field and if I manually retype the value while in debugging mode everything works fine.

Solution

  • I took a look at the char array and it appears that there is a Byte Order Mark character coming through in that string.

    That char was being serialized as a "?".

    Thanks to @poke for the troubleshooting suggestion.