Issues with special characters in QBO API v3 .NET SDK

Question

I'm using the .NET SDK to import customers and transactions from another system that accepts UTF-8 encoding in their data, and am having a lot of trouble with special characters. Is there a comprehensive list of (a) what characters need to be escaped (like apostrophe), and (b) what characters are simply not allowed in QBO (like colon)? All I can find in the online doc is "use backslash to escape special characters like apostrophe". OK, what about ampersand, em dash, en dash, grave accent, acute accent... you get the idea.

This problem affects both queries and inserts which causes all kinds of problems. For example, if we query a customer by name, and the query fails (maybe due to an invalid character), we try to insert the customer in QBO, which of course also fails, either due to the customer existing or invalid characters. True, we can usually figure out if the query failed due to a bad character vs the record not existing, but we need a design-time solution. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If you use Query endpoint, then please URL encode the query parameters.

For ex -

For the following query

select * from Customer where DisplayName='Aülleünte'

URL request would be

https://quickbooks.api.intuit.com/v3/company/<relamId>/query?query=select+*+from+Customer+where+DisplayName%3D%27A%C3%BClle%C3%BCnte%27

PN - Some QBO textfields(for ex - 'Description/Note' of Customer window) allow to enter control characters which gets returned as part of query response. As some of those characters are not supported in XML, object deserialization fails/shows warning. You should either remove those characters from UI or you need to use some lib/regex in the client side code to remove those characters programmatically. Ideally it should be handled in the server side.

QBO Global UI supports UTF-8 encoding for sure. But It seems, QBO US UI behaves differently while dealing with special characters.

For ex - In QBO US UI, if you enter '你好嗎' then after saving, it gets converted to '}Î'.

Edit

Here is a list of accepted characters:

•Alpha-numeric (A-Z, a-z, 0-9)

•Comma (,)

•Dot or period (.)

•Question mark (?)

•At symbol (@)

•Ampersand (&)

•Exclamation point (!)

•Number/pound sign (#)

•Single quote (')

•Tilde (~)

•Asterisk (*)

•Space ( )

•Underscore (_)

•Minus sign/hyphen (-)

•Semi-colon (;)

•Plus sign (+)

Thanks