Parsing Json into a dynamic c# object with a dynamic key

Question

I'm trying to parse this Google calendar response I'm getting from their Rest API using c#, but I seem to keep getting stuck. [edited] Update, the @ symbol isn't preventing the drill down, I verified by replacing the @ with _at_. See the screenshot of the Quick watch:

I'm sure I'm accessing this incorrectly...

Here's the jsonString I'm trying to parse:

{
 "kind": "calendar#freeBusy",
 "timeMin": "2015-06-12T14:00:00.000Z",
 "timeMax": "2015-06-14T14:00:00.000Z",
 "calendars": {
  "[email protected]": {
   "busy": [
    {
     "start": "2015-06-13T18:30:00Z",
     "end": "2015-06-13T19:30:00Z"
    },
    {
     "start": "2015-06-13T20:30:00Z",
     "end": "2015-06-13T21:30:00Z"
    },
    {
     "start": "2015-06-13T23:00:00Z",
     "end": "2015-06-14T00:00:00Z"
    }
   ]
  }
 }
}

I've tried using:

dynamic myObj = Json.Decode(jsonString);

and

var myObj = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject(jsonString);

but I can't figure out how to get into the [email protected] key (which is dynamic based on what I send up) to cycle through all the busy times.

Ideas?

Answer 1

You can access it via a string indexer:

var myObj = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<dynamic>(jsonString);
Console.WriteLine(myObj.calendars["[email protected]"]);

Answer 2

I have dealt with a similar problem in the past, however mine was a matter of hyphen, i simply replaced hyphen with underscore. you could potentially do something similar however seeing that it's a e-mail address, it might be a better to modify the schema (regular-expression seeing that you receive json from a third party API) create a new key "mail" so that you can ensure that you keep the original email address intact.

But perhaps more importantly, as you query this API perhaps you already knew the email, if so you could simply do a regex replace:

        string json = '... {"[email protected]":...}...';
        Regex regex = new Regex(@"\b[A-Za-z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\.[A-Za-z]{2,6}\b");
        string jsonfixed = regex.Replace(json, "email");