In my ASP.Net REST controller I do the following:

return BadRequest("A problem happened!"); 

When calling this over HTTP I get the message as follows:

HttpResponseMessage response = await _httpClient.GetAsync(url); if (!response.IsSuccessStatusCode) { var errorMessage = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync(); 

But the value of the errorMessage is:

"\"A problem happened!\"" 

When I run through PostMan it doesn't include the quote marks even in the raw output view so I'm not sure if they are being added on for some reason, but I would rather avoid having to manually strip them.

I based my work on this other question where nobody seemed to have this issue: BadRequest custom error message not returned to client?