As I've done twice before, I'm going to try to save someone else a couple of hours of hair pulling.

I'm playing with some RESTful web services with a rails app as the client. The service returns JSON.

Cool.

As defined in the spec, JSON strings may contain Unicode characters escaped as '\u four-hex-digits'.

Let's say you had a JSON result with xml, like {"value":"<xml/>"}.

The service might return {"value":"\u003cxml/\u003e"}.

That's fine, except the default JSON parser in rails--ActiveSupport::JSON--doesn't (yet?) support unescaping the Unicode characters.

Boo!

A blog post pointed me to the stand-alone JSON rails gem.

That solved my problem.

Happy hacking, my friends.