cURL and unicode? text problem

Scripting Forums AppleScript | Mac OS X
#1

Hello again,

This problem might be a bit offtopic. I hope someone still can help.

I am using AppleScript to envoke cURL using do shell script.
Unfortunately the resulted xml includes some unwanted characters.

See for yourself:

do shell script "curl -d method=event.search -G -d api_key=0ccd79f5e6 -d search_text=Arcade_Fire -d metro_id=11 " & quoted form of "http://upcoming.org/services/rest/"

1.) I guess the problems lies within cURL and there might be a way to tell cURL how to format it’s output, but i looket into cURLs man page and could’t find any relevant commands

2.) Maybe it’s possible to convert the result so it is displayed correctly using AppleScript.
I tried using as unicode text and ended up with chinese text…

Any tipps?

Greetings
research

#2

What are the unwanted characters?

#3

Well, I’m sure there’s a better name for them…

By example &(the old end, like i would call it) ends up being &
a quote character ends up being " and an ’ ends up being '.

I’m really bad at naming characters!

#4

I thought so. That’s expected behavior for XML; ampersands, quotes, angled brackets (< and >), and other characters can have special meanings, so they are encoded (otherwise, it wouldn’t be valid XML).

The trick now is figuring out the best way to decode them.

#5

by decoding them you mean, writing handlers that replace a certain character with another?

there’s the replace_chars subroutine from apples essential subroutines http://www.apple.com/applescript/guidebook/sbrt/index.html
which could do the replacing.

on replace_chars(this_text, search_string, replacement_string)
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to the search_string
	set the item_list to every text item of this_text
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to the replacement_string
	set this_text to the item_list as string
	set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
	return this_text
end replace_chars

so one only has to find out which xml specific string is connected to which character.
i’m gonna take a look at that!

thanks for the answers!

so, i guess, this was not a unicode problem right?

#6

By the way, it’s not easy to search for posts concerning XML when search keywords with less than 4 characters are being ignored…

#7

so, i came up with this nearly perfect working subroutine:

set myXML to "It's working quite & well, except for the "quotes"!"

decode_XML(myXML)

on decode_XML(this_text)
	set search_strings to {"&", """, "'", "<", ">"}
	set replacement_strings to {"&", "\"", "'", "<", ">"}
	repeat with i from 1 to (count of search_strings)
		set search_string to item i of search_strings
		set replacement_string to item i of replacement_strings
		if this_text contains search_string then
			set AppleScript's text item delimiters to search_string
			set the item_list to every text item of this_text
			set AppleScript's text item delimiters to replacement_string
			set this_text to the item_list as string
			set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
		end if
	end repeat
	return this_text
end decode_XML

It’s working fine, except for the quotes!

#8

It’s how the SQL search works, sorry.

What’s wrong with the quotes?

#9

the quotes are displayed like this "

#10

That’s because AppleScript escapes quotes when they’re are displayed; the actual text won’t contain those slashes.

#11

You are right, when displaying a dialog the quotes are displayed perfectly right.
I didn’t know that AppleScript escapes quotes in the result window…
Sorry!

Thanks for the help again!