API returning character entities in JSON

Question

I noticed display names in the JSON contain HTML character entities; e.g. /2.0/users/718618?order=desc&sort=reputation&site=stackoverflow

Gives me:

{
  "items": [
    {
      "user_id": 718618,
      "user_type": "registered",
      "creation_date": 1303376809,
      "display_name": "Cédric Julien",
...

I can HtmlDecode the display names I'm getting from the API. Would it be better if the API just returned the UTF8 character?

Relevant SO question: JSON character encoding

Answer 1

The default filter is unsafe=false, so the strings are coming back escaped. If I create a filter with unsafe=true the names come thru without the escaping.