Custom UrlDecoder

[ItSkary]

I was reading the project source before incorporating (through nuget) into the product i'm working on.
I have to admint that at this moment i have just a grasp about how this project work, but lot of thing still missing in the big picture in my mind.

A thing that certainly surprise me, is that i read this method that seems to implement a custom url decoder :

In OpenGraph.cs

    /// <summary>
    /// Safes the HTML decode URL.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="value">The value.</param>
    /// <returns>The string.</returns>
    private static string HtmlDecodeUrl(string value)
    {
        if (value == null)
        {
            return string.Empty;
        }

        // naive attempt
        var patterns = new Dictionary<string, string>
        {
            ["&amp;"] = "&",
        };

        foreach (var key in patterns)
        {
            value = value.Replace(key.Key, key.Value);
        }

        return value;
    }

I am really surprised about this code, why doesn't use the framework objects to do so? And why writing a decoding method that only handle '&'. I am really puzzled about that.

[ghorsey]

Good question. It's been a long time since I looked through all this code!

IIRC, this is carried over from the original .Net Framework version of this library. Back in the day to access html en/decode you had to go through HttpContext like HttpContext.Current.Server.HtmlDecode(). I believe this was before HttpUtility was a thing.

Since this was a class library, I couldn't guarantee that HttpContext was present and this was the simplest solution for what was needed at the time.

So today, this is likely a bit of technical debt.

[ghorsey]

Also, if you want, fix this bit of code to use HttpUtility and raise a PR if all the tests continue to pass 😃