Alexa Display Templates ASCII character Error

[soltrinox]

I'm submitting a...

• [ x] Bug report
• [ ] Feature request
• [ ] Documentation issue or request
• [ ] Other... Please describe:

Expected Behavior

Alexa Display Templates https://www.jovo.tech/docs/amazon-alexa/visual-output#body-templates

Getting error with & sign , this is not problem with standard this.tell or this.ask , I had to change my speech output to AND vs. & .

Current Behavior

I get an error when have ampersand & symbol is in display text and speech output.

[aswetlow]

Hey @soltrinox

yeah, it works for tell, but it's a workaround in the toSSML method. It always replaces & to AND for every language, which is bad. We need a more generic way. I will keep that in mind for v2.

A quick workaround for now would be to replace it on your own. text.replace(/&/g, 'and')

[IGx89]

Jovo defaults to RichText instead of PlainText when adding text to display templates, so you'll need to make sure to XML escape any text you put in them. We ran into this same issue, and ended up solving it by using the xml-escape module (that's what Jovo uses behind the scenes to allow your tell and ask calls to work).

Example:

const xmlEscape = require('xml-escape');
...
const template = this.alexaSkill().templateBuilder('BodyTemplate3')
    .setToken(token)
    .setTitle(title)
    .setTextContent(`<b><font size="5">${xmlEscape(clazz.name)}</font></b>`);

this.alexaSkill().showDisplayTemplate(template);

Official XML special character guidelines from Amazon: https://developer.amazon.com/docs/custom-skills/display-interface-reference.html#xml-special-characters. The xml-escape module handles the first five character replacements -- the final two we'll likely never encounter.

[aswetlow]

Closing this due to inactivity.