SP Services does not update the list item

Question

SP Services : UpdateListItems does not update the list item. The problem lies with the value that needs to be updated. The item is updated when the value is a normal text, but when it has some special characters like '&' the update doesn't work.

Any idea how to tackle this?

Answer 1

The problem isn't with SPServices. The problem is we are trying to use reserved characters.

Try using the following functions,

escapeColumnValue("Yourvalue")

// Escape column values
function escapeColumnValue(s) {
    return s.replace(/&(?![a-zA-Z]{1,8};)/g, "&");
    //(/&/g,'&');
}

OR

xmlencode("yourvalue");

Source

Hope this helps you :)

Answer 2

In case it's useful to anyone, I had a similar problem with the < character, which is also reserved. The replace function wasn't working because the encoding for < is <, so I used replace(/</g, '&' + 'amp;' + 'lt;') and it worked.