# Escape Character Issue

**URL:** <https://community.thunk.ai/t/escape-character-issue/162>\
**Category:** General Questions\
**Tags:** api-tools\
**Created:** [October 3, 2025, 7:30pm UTC](https://community.thunk.ai/t/escape-character-issue/162 "2025-10-03T19:30:55Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Ryan\_Parent](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex003/user_avatar/community.thunk.ai/ryan_parent/32/140_2.png) [@Ryan\_Parent](https://community.thunk.ai/u/Ryan_Parent)\
**Post date:** [October 3, 2025, 7:30pm UTC](https://community.thunk.ai/t/escape-character-issue/162/1 "2025-10-03T19:30:55Z")

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I have a Thunk that uses an API tool sending data to Appsheet. When the data gets to Appsheet some text shows up as HTML entity codes or entity names as shown in the screenshots below. Not sure why this is happening. Interesting that the & is replaced with the entity name, while the ‘ is replaced with the entity number.

Screenshot from Thunk execution AI:

 ![image](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex003/uploads/thunkai/original/1X/869ec32e5ebd69529a7dc2f1718a07ec04894337.png)

Screenshot from in Appsheet:

 ![image](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex003/uploads/thunkai/original/1X/c34c56113f2058fda7762c694f8bbe313cda3b98.png)

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**Author:** ![tony](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex003/user_avatar/community.thunk.ai/tony/32/11_2.png) [@tony](https://community.thunk.ai/u/tony)\
**Post date:** [October 3, 2025, 8:39pm UTC](https://community.thunk.ai/t/escape-character-issue/162/2 "2025-10-03T20:39:51Z")

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Hi @Ryan_Parent this might be an issue with the EJS templates used in the tool definition. EJS uses different tags that provide different types of escaping:

 ![image](https://canada1.discourse-cdn.com/flex003/uploads/thunkai/original/1X/699dce8b34ad831cba71c056823e8e4d152d3d40.png)

Maybe you could switch the tag type and it would work?

> **[EJS -- Embedded JavaScript templates](https://ejs.co/#docs)**
>
> 'E' is for 'effective'. EJS is a simple templating language that lets you generate HTML markup with plain JavaScript. No religiousness about how to organize things. No reinvention of iteration and control-flow. It's just plain JavaScript.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Ryan\_Parent](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex003/user_avatar/community.thunk.ai/ryan_parent/32/140_2.png) [@Ryan\_Parent](https://community.thunk.ai/u/Ryan_Parent)\
**Post date:** [October 7, 2025, 5:45pm UTC](https://community.thunk.ai/t/escape-character-issue/162/3 "2025-10-07T17:45:54Z")

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Thanks Tony, switching from \<%= to \<%- did the trick.