How do I add newlines when editing a post body via the API?

Question

I am editing the tags of a question via the API, and to do that you have to pass the body and title etc.

I can get the Markdown or HTML from the API but I can't see how to send it back formatted properly.

These revisions pretty much show what I've tried:

• \n\r. Didn't work (rev 4).

• <br><br>, as given by the API Markdown. Didn't work (rev 6).

• <p>...</p>, as given by the API HTML. Works (rev 8), but boy does that question Markdown look ugly.

• designed%20for%20the%20following%20 - URL encode. Didn't work (rev 9).

• %0A%0A replacing \n\r. Didn't work (rev 12).

So how do I edit it neatly?

---

Even direct copy / paste from the source page into the body box gives bad results.

Answer 1

The \r\n issue was solved when I changed to a POST request.

But, since I was retagging questions (didn't really need to change the body, just resend it), I ended up using the body_markdown, encoded with HTMLParser.HTMLParser().unescape()

body_markdown = str(HTMLParser.HTMLParser().unescape(question_data['items'][0]['body_markdown']))

And then sending it with:

response = requests.post('https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/questions/'+str(q_id)+'/edit',
      data={'body': body_markdown,
            'comment': 'removed '+tag+' tag',
            'tags': ' '.join(tags),
            'title': title,
            'access_token': token,
            'site': site,
            'key': key
            }
        )