Overview
These functions give you the ability to interact with third-party APIs, feeds and HTTP-accessible content, while also retrieving information related to web browsers that are used to access Marketing Cloud-hosted web content.
Many online services available today provide integration capabilities through REST or SOAP Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The HTTP functions in Marketing Cloud effectively provide an API client interface where data can be retrieved from, or sent to third-party platforms.
Applications include:
- harvesting content from external URLs (for example, product data)
- including social media or news feeds on web pages and in emails
- displaying weather information based on a Subscriber’s geographic location
- adding data-driven personalized maps and charts to marketing content
- shortening personalized URL links in SMS messages.
HTTP functions respect the character set from the Content-Type HTTP header, returned in the request. For example:
| Content-Type | Encoding |
|---|---|
text/html; charset=utf-8 |
UTF-8 |
text/json; charset=utf-16 |
UTF-16 |
text/plain; charset=us-ascii |
US-ASCII |
text/plain; charset=iso-8859-5 |
ISO 8859-5 |
If the character set encoding is not specified in the HTTP header, Marketing Cloud interprets the content using ‘WindowsCodePage 1252’ character-encoding. However, this default encoding can be changed by contacting your Marketing Cloud Support Representative.
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