I am receiving data from a web service, and some of the strings have html entities in them, for example: {"prop": "htmlentity - é"} The é is not being parsed to é. My question is twofold: 1. Is this even supposed to happen? I looked through the JSON spec the best I could, but couldn't find any reference to html entities. 2. What is the right way to do this with a DataContractJsonSerializer, if there is a right way?