ambiguity between a string and a dynamic object

Question

        string code = "ru";
        string searchUrl = $"{Endpoint}getLangs?key={ApiKey}&ui=en";
        string json;
        using (var client = new WebClient())
        {
            json = client.DownloadString(searchUrl);
        }

        var dataObject = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<dynamic>(json);
        return dataObject.langs.code;

In this snippet here searchUrl is a string and holds the URL of the API I am using. Now the last line return dataObject.langs.code; returns null as there is no such entry in the json which is in dataObject(a dynamic object). But return dataObject.langs.ru; returns a proper string that I was expecting.

This is happening because in return dataObject.langs.code; code is a dynamic member of dataObject and not the string code i declared above. How can I use that code that I declared and not the dynamic code it thinks there exists in dataObject since it is dynamic.

Answer 1

I wouldn't use dynamic at all. That's typically useful when you know the names you want to use at compile-time. I'd deserialize to a JObject and just use indexers, where you can provide the property name either using something you know at compile-time (like "langs") or something you only know at execution time (like code):

var dataObject = JObject.Parse(json);
// Modify this to cast to whatever type you're actually interested in
return (string) dataObject["langs"][code];

Here's a complete example:

using System;
using System.IO;
using Newtonsoft.Json.Linq;

class Test
{
    static void Main()
    {
        string json = File.ReadAllText("test.json");
        string code = "ru";
        JObject dataObject = JObject.Parse(json);
        string result = (string) dataObject["langs"][code];
        Console.WriteLine(result);
    }
}

With test.json containing:

{
  "langs": {
    "ru": "Russian",
    "en": "English",
    "fr": "French"
  },
  "misc": {
    "foo": "bar"
  }
}

Output:

Russian