Question

I am integrating an app with a service (iContact), that describes its API as “rest-like”. I post XML, and everything works fine… Until I send special characters like æøå – then I get a “bad request” error from the server.

<contacts>
  <contact>
    <firstname>Søren</firstname>
    <lastname>ÆbleTårn</lastname>
  </contact>
</contact>

I tried putting firstname and lastname values in cdata, but that did not help.

Is there some encoding I can apply to values (similar to html-encode), or do I need to move in another direction?

I doubt the problem is specific to .Net, but the answer might be, so here is the code I use:

Dim xml as string = GenerateXml()
Dim http As New HttpClient("http://uri.to/rest")
Dim resp As HttpResponseMessage = http.Post(String.Empty, HttpContent.Create(xml))

Answer 1

You can use numeric entities in XML to help with some encoding issues:

<firstname>S&#xf8;ren</firstname>

But you still have to be sure the server is coded correct to receive, process and store these characters. It’s hard to know where the error is here…