How to convert a string containing escape characters to a string

Question

I have a string that is returned to me which contains escape characters.

Here is a sample string

\"test\\40gmail.com\"

A

Answer 1

The sample string provided ("test\40gmail.com") is JID escaped. It is not malformed, and HttpUtility/WebUtility will not correctly handle this escaping scheme.

You can certainly do it with string or regex functions, as suggested in the answers from dasblinkenlight and C.Barlow. This is probably the cleanest way to achieve the desired result. I'm not aware of any .NET libraries for decoding JID escaping, and a brief search hasn't turned up much. Here is a link to some source which may be useful, though.