API yields weird characters

Question

Im connecting to an external API which returns messages with the character

Response:

<daoapi>
  <status>FEJL</status>
  <fejlkode>520</fejlkode>
  <fejltekst>Fejl ved opslag: Der er fejl i input parametre:&#13;
Husnummer mangler eller er ikke numerisk&#13;
</fejltekst>
</daoapi>

It's in danish, but you can see the characters occuring twice

How can I escape this?

possible duplicate of [What is ?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1459170/what-is-13) — dgilperez, Feb 11 '15 at 13:46
When you say "escape this", what precisely do you mean? Do you mean that you want to turn that character into its unicode equivalent? — Wayne Conrad, Feb 12 '15 at 19:28

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 11 '15 at 15:54

You should parse the XML response with Nokogiri, it handles entity conversion.

require 'nokogiri'

response = <<-XML
<daoapi>
  <status>FEJL</status>
  <fejlkode>520</fejlkode>
  <fejltekst>Fejl ved opslag: Der er fejl i input parametre:&#13;
Husnummer mangler eller er ikke numerisk&#13;
</fejltekst>
</daoapi>
XML

doc = Nokogiri::XML(response)
doc.at_xpath('//fejltekst').text
#=> "Fejl ved opslag: Der er fejl i input parametre:\r\nHusnummer mangler eller er ikke numerisk\r\n"

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 11 '15 at 13:45

That's no weird character but an ASCII-encoded character interpretable as an Carriage Return. Check AsciiTable or any other reference.

You can either reencode you output to change it to \n, a html entity or probably leave it like that as it will cause no harm.

API yields weird characters

2 Answers2