Sending a Slack Message via Xano - How to escape \n markdown in Xano?

Stephen Smith

I am trying to send a slack chat notification via Xano.

I can successfully send a slack message using the external API request function in Xano using a POST.

As part of the POST you need to send through a JSON body with a value of...
{
"text": "This is my text to send\nmy second line"
}No matter what I do the newline markdown \n, is formatted as \n in the request sent from Xano and not interpreted correctly by Slack.
[image.png]
How would I go about escaping \n? 

Any help as always is greatly appreciated. 😀

Michael Udinski

 - I might need some more info. I just ran various tests using \n and it correctly created a newline in the messages sent to slack.

Stephen Smith

Hey ,

I have created a slack app via - https://api.slack.com/

For my app, I then created an incoming webhook, which is installed to a specific channel.

Within Xano I have a simple function which consists of...
• A text variable which contains "This is my text to send\nmy second line"
• An external API request to post to my slack apps webhook (which sends the text to my slack channel)

[image.png][image.png]
[image.png]No matter which way I try the line break in the text variable \n \n "\n" slack does not seem to interpret it correctly.

The Xano output will always escape the character.
[image.png]Output in Slack:[image.png]
I am not sure if this is a Xano issue or a Slack issue, but I am starting to lean more towards this being a slack issue? What do you think?

Michael Udinski

 - ah you are passing the text in a variable...

So passing the text through as an input, you have it as part of the JSON input which lets you enter in data in escaped form. So as an input:

this is my text to send\n my second line

works perfectly fine.

However, a regular variable is post-escaped. So you would need to say:

this is my text to send"\n"my second line
|json_encode|

[CleanShot 2022-01-21 at 11.55.25.png]

Stephen Smith

, sorry for the late reply. Just wanted to say this worked. Thank you.

Nathan Cox

Same problem but been unable to get this working.
[image.png]Adding "\n" as concatenation, then using json_encode on the variable after
[image.png]
Result on slack:
[image.png]Any ideas?

Nathan Cox

Solved: 

Use shift+enter instead of \n as the separator

Ambroise

Just wondering, how do you send Slack messages from Xano? Do you have to use Slack's API?

Is there a simpler way? (an integration)