This version of the API is in beta. Although we expect the API to have only minor changes between 0.95 and 1.0, there may be some that affect your application, and features might change without prior notice. Please do not use this API on other than experimental and beta products for the time being.

We are, as always, extremely interested in your feedback. If you find a bug, something unclear, or something that could be improved, either in the API itself, the documentation, or in something else surrounding the API, please contact us.

Content Encoding in Hyves API 0.95

Content encoding is one of the most complicated (and therefore arguably most interesting) issues in computer programming (together with Network Byte Order and Timezones & Daylight savings :) ). Anyway, we have to deal with it as soon as we are to do anything with non-ASCII characters.

All calls and replies happen in UTF-8: The url-encoding encodes UTF-8 strings, the XML is UTF8 encoded, and javascript string literals (and JSON) are always UTF-8.

This does not mean that we support UTF-8 throughout Hyves. Internally we have most things encoded as Latin-1, so if you do a request that contains a character that cannot be represented in latin-1, an error with errornumber 7 is returned.

url encoding

Correct url encoding is extremely important for an oAuth application. This is because the signature is calculated on the basis of url encoded parameters. An interesting article on what needs to be done in different languages, can be found here. Alternatively, one could make sure that all encoding Test cases work correctly.

All strings should be UTF-8 before the url encoding is applied.