Unicode Blog Article title through API

Question

I am having an issue with the Shopify API when creating a new Article object for a Blog. I have an app which imports merchant's 3rd party blogs into Shopify. Some of these blogs are non-english, and so contain plenty of unicode characters. I can encode the body for these posts just fine using xml character replacement, but I can not encode the titles. For example, here is a sample blog in Russian imported into a Shopify test store: http://heller-sawayn5574.myshopify.com/blogs/unicode (original blog here: http://recen-zist.livejournal.com/)

You can see the body is shown properly encoded, but the title isn't and appears garbled. Shopify takes the xml encoded characters and displays them in the title literally, instead of the characters being converted back to unicode, as is the case in the body of the article.

If I log into the store admin and change the title manually to include unicode characters, it will display correctly. So the issue only happens when creating the blog post via the API. However, any post created with unicode characters in the title is then non-editable using the API due to this error.

Answer 1

I found a workaround for this by not XML encoding the title characters, but instead leaving them as UTF-8. I was using the Python Shopify API, and using UTF-8 was not previously possible, forcing me to encode using XML. For a background of the problem see this discussion: https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups=#!topic/shopify-app-discuss/T5gee1A_2lE

The workaround is to update the pyactiveresource dependency to version 1.0.2

There is still the issue of why xml character encoding will work for the blog post body, but not for the blog title. But as long as there's another way to do it, this shouldn't matter much.