Can’t quite understand why the Genesys Cloud Quality Management API returns a 400 Bad Request when attempting to create a custom survey question via POST /api/v2/quality/surveys. The payload structure seems correct based on the Swagger docs, yet the response body indicates a validation failure on the question_text field, citing an unsupported character encoding issue.
In our previous Zendesk environment, we simply injected custom fields into the ticket metadata, and the satisfaction widget handled the rendering seamlessly. The migration guide suggests mapping these directly to GC surveys, but the strictness of the Genesys schema is catching us off guard. We are using the standard v2 SDK for Python, version 1.5.2, and have verified that the UTF-8 encoding is applied before the request is sent.
Is there a specific character limit or regex pattern enforced on survey questions that differs from the UI behavior? The documentation is sparse on edge cases for special characters in French, such as accents or ligatures, which are common in our support transcripts. Any insights on how to sanitize this input before the API call would be appreciated.
The simplest way to resolve this is to sanitize the input payload before sending it to the Quality Management API. The 400 error regarding question_text usually stems from hidden Unicode characters or improper UTF-8 encoding when data is migrated from external systems like Zendesk.
In my experience with bulk exports and legal discovery, raw text fields often contain zero-width spaces or non-breaking spaces that pass local validation but fail Genesys Cloud’s strict schema checks. You should strip these characters programmatically.
A simple regex replacement in your integration script helps: question_text.replace(/[\u200B-\u200D\uFEFF]/g, '')
Also, verify that your API client is explicitly setting the Content-Type header to application/json; charset=utf-8. The Swagger docs assume this, but many SDKs default to ASCII or ISO-8859-1, causing the server to reject the payload during the initial parsing phase. Check the raw request body in your logs to confirm the encoding matches exactly what the endpoint expects.
If I remember correctly, the regex approach is solid, but you’ll often run into issues where the encoding happens at the HTTP header level before the body even gets parsed. In my hybrid setup, I’ve seen this fail silently if the Content-Type isn’t explicitly set to application/json; charset=utf-8. Just setting it to application/json can leave the server guessing, leading to those weird validation failures on text fields. Here’s a quick curl test to verify your headers are clean:
Make sure that charset=utf-8 part is there. It’s a small detail but it stops a lot of 400 Bad Request errors when moving data from Zendesk or other legacy systems. Also, double-check that you aren’t accidentally sending \r\n line endings if you’re constructing the JSON string in code. Genesys Cloud’s API parser is strict about UTF-8 BOM markers too. If you’re pulling this data from a CSV export, those invisible bytes at the start of the file can mess up the whole payload.
Another thing to watch for is the question type mapping. If you’re trying to map a Zendesk rating scale directly to a Genesys radio button without defining the options correctly, the API will reject it even if the text is clean. The docs mention this, but it’s easy to miss. Try stripping the text down to plain ASCII first, just to isolate the issue. If that works, then you know it’s definitely an encoding or character set problem. Don’t forget to check the API logs in your org admin panel if it still fails. They usually give a more specific error code than just “validation failed”.
Ah, this is a known issue. the regex strip is fine for local validation, but if you’re pulling from zendesk exports, the payload often carries invisible control chars that survive basic ascii filters. when i map these into grafana dashboards for queue metrics, i’ve seen the analytics api reject the whole batch if one survey question has a zero-width space (u+200b) or a non-breaking space (u+00a0).
don’t just rely on re.sub. you need to normalize the string before hitting the /api/v2/quality/surveys endpoint. here’s a quick python snippet that handles the normalization properly. it strips the control chars and replaces the problematic whitespace variants with standard spaces. this prevents the 400 error and keeps the data clean for downstream visualization.
import unicodedata
def clean_survey_text(text):
# normalize unicode to canonical form
text = unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', text)
# strip control chars excluding tab/newline if needed, but for single line text fields, strip all
return ''.join(c for c in text if c.isprintable() or c in [' ', '\t'])
also, check your Content-Type header. it must be explicitly application/json; charset=utf-8. if you leave it as just application/json, the gateway might default to a different encoding depending on the client library, which triggers that obscure validation failure on question_text.
i usually wrap this in a small middleware step before the api call. it’s not just about the regex, it’s about ensuring the byte stream is pure utf-8 without any legacy encoding artifacts. if you’re still getting 400s, dump the raw hex of the request body. you’ll likely see those hidden bytes right before the validation error.