My problem is when I get a string from the REST service and set it as a string in java. It looks like this
<string xmlns=\"http://schemas.microsoft.com/2003/10/Serialization/\">returnedValue</string>
How should I go about extracting the returnedValue from this?
Your string is just an XML fragment (or document by itself) so to get the value you will need to parse it. You can do so by many different means but for this specific case maybe the best option is to use something like:
Other options would be to use a regular expression or an XML parser.