reading and displaying a webservice output in classic asp - web-services

Question

I am reading a webservice output from classic asp.
Web service output is as follows.
<boolean xmlns="http://somewebsite.com/">true</boolean>
This is proper output as expected.
I have written below code to read this output in classic asp.
Set obj1 = Server.createobject("MSXML2.ServerXMLHTTP.3.0")
URL1 = "http://webserive.asmx/method?para=2"
obj1.open "GET", URL1, False
obj1.setRequestHeader "Content-Type", "application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8"
obj1.setRequestHeader "SOAPAction", URL1
obj1.send
if obj1.responseText <> "" Then
response.write "ok." & obj1.responseText
end if
But this output prints following output:
"ok. true"
There is a space in the output which is not expected.
This is the problem.
Please advice.

Answer 1

Your output from ResponseText for all intense and purpose is valid HTML structure as far as an Internet Browser is concerned and will treat it accordingly. When you use Response.Write() to send content to a Browser it is sent "as is" so in this case the <boolean> element is seen as HTML so only the contained text true is outputted.
To fix this you first need to HTML encode the ResponseText before you send it to the Browser so the Browser knows to treat what is sent as plain old text. You do this by calling the method Server.HTMLEncode()
Response.Write "ok." & Server.HTMLEncode(obj1.ResponseText)
According to MSDN;
The HTMLEncode method applies HTML encoding to a specified string. This is useful as a quick method of encoding form data and other client request data before using it in your Web application. Encoding data converts potentially unsafe characters to their HTML-encoded equivalent.
If the string to be encoded is not Double-Byte Character Set (DBCS), HTMLEncode converts characters as follows:
The less-than character (<) is converted to <.
The greater-than character (>) is converted to >.
The ampersand character (&) is converted to &.
The double-quote character (") is converted to ".
Any ASCII code character whose code is greater-than or equal to 0x80 is converted to &#<number>, where <number> is the ASCII character value.
If the string to be encoded is DBCS, HTMLEncode converts characters as follows:
All extended characters are converted.
Any ASCII code character whose code is greater-than or equal to 0x80 is converted to &#<number>, where <number> is the ASCII character value.
Half-width Katakana characters in the Japanese code page are not converted.
At the moment when send the ResponseText this happens;
ResponseText
<boolean xmlns="http://somewebsite.com/">true</boolean>
Output at client
ok.true
If you use Server.HTMLEncode() it will be;
ResponseText (HTML Encoded)
<boolean xmlns=&quote;http://somewebsite.com/&quote;>true</boolean>
Output at client
ok.<boolean xmlns="http://somewebsite.com/">true</boolean>

Answer 2

So I think I may have miss understood what you require. If you want to parse the XML to remove it so only the content of;
<boolean xmlns="http://somewebsite.com/">true</boolean>
is returned to the browser in this case true then you need to parse the XML using something like XPath to get the underlying value.
'After the initial Send()
Dim xml, root
If obj1.Status = 200 Then
Set xml = obj1.ResponseXML
Call xml.SetProperty("SelectionLanguage", "XPath")
Set root = xml.DocumentElement
Call Response.Write(root.SelectSingleNode("boolean").Text)
End If