JSON string with backslashes does not deserialize into borrowed &str

[Noelle-Dev]

Hi all, as a personal project, I am trying to develop a tool for a game that I've been playing called Path of Exile. The tool is intended to scrape market data and display currency trade prices. I am a C++ developer by nature but I want to learn a new language and chose Rust for this project.

The first step is to scrape item information to build a list of available items. I've done it for the most part, with one exception. So here is an example of the json object that I want to deserialize:
{ "id": "exa", "text": "Exalted Orb", "image": "\/image\/Art\/2DItems\/Currency\/CurrencyAddModToRare.png?v=1745ebafbd533b6f91bccf588ab5efc5" }

I am having trouble deserializing the image value. I am trying to store it into a &str.
It seems like serde is not able to handle escape characters. Can anyone help me with this issue?

[jonasbb]

The problem here is that due to the escape sequences, serde_json cannot simply hand out a reference to the original string, since the escape sequences need to be removed while deserializing. You can deserialize this into a String or a Cow<'_, str>. You can also apply #[serde(borrow)] to the latter to get zero copy deserialization when possible.

If it has to be zero copy deserialization you can look into in situ parsing for `serde_json. There is an issue and a pull request for it.