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YAML Problem with single quotes unexpected scalar at node end

I am reading an application.yml file in my java Spring application, and getting this property called body to send in a request (it is a very very long json), sometimes it contains names or values like you will see in the example ahead, and it messes up the yml, any way to solve this so that it takes the json properly? Here is a little example of the kind of data that messes my application.yml (that comes inside that very big json):
data:
body: '{"name":"O'brien"}'
The problem is the ' in the persons name
I tried using: <%='putting the very big json here'%> but then I get "Nested mappings are not allowed in compact mappings", also tried
<%=very big json%> but get the same error

Invalid Characters at Start of JSON Body of Dropwizard Rest API

I have created a basic CRUD API using Dropwizard and Spring. In the body of my response object, I am receiving the following:
)]}',
{
"id":10,
"initiator":2,
"target":1,
"statusId":1,
"created":"2018-04-30T14:45:01.173"
}
I checked the API using curl, postman, and programatically during testing with rest assured, and the invalid characters )]}', are always present. Postman seems to be capable of ignoring them and displaying a pretty printed output, however rest assured, and I'm guessing most JSON parsers, can't parse it correctly.
Questions:
What are they?
Why are they present?
How do I remove them?
I've been writing REST APIs for years and I've never seen anything like this. This is my first time using dropwizard so I'm optimistically hoping it is some configuration I have missed.
Apart from the the invalid characters, functionally the API works fine.
This is an inherited codebase, and other APIs return these characters also. For the purposes of testing in rest assured the invalid characters are filtered out before processing the response. While this seems acceptable to me as a workaround in the short term, long term any future consumers of the API will all have to perform the workaround, and ideally this would be fixed in the API itself.

Not aware of DropWizard but it is there to prevent json-hijacking.
In Spring there is a MappingJackson2HttpMessageConverter class.
which has same feature, but prefix is different "{} &&"
/**
* Indicate whether the JSON output by this view should be prefixed with "{} &&". Default is false.
* <p>Prefixing the JSON string in this manner is used to help prevent JSON Hijacking.
* The prefix renders the string syntactically invalid as a script so that it cannot be hijacked.
* This prefix does not affect the evaluation of JSON, but if JSON validation is performed on the
* string, the prefix would need to be ignored.
*/
public void setPrefixJson(boolean prefixJson) {
this.prefixJson = prefixJson;
}
You can relate to this.
Edit 1:
Spring version 4.2.0.RELEASE onwards, default prefix has been updated to )]}',

How to escape Special Characters in JSON

We have a form which has a long paragraph for a scienctific application that contains characters like symbol beta(ß-arrestin) etc. We have a JSON service running on Mule that takes the data and persists to an oracle database. This particular element with long paragraph is giving me an error in RAML/JSON. Below is the error
com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonParseException: Illegal unquoted character ((CTRL-CHAR, code 9)): has to be escaped using backslash to be included in string value
The form element to which the scientists write we have no control. So on the Mule side how can we escape these characters automagically like java has URLEncoded. Many Thanks

In your case it looks like the incoming data is malformed. It must be in an encoding supported by the JSON spec: UTF-8 (default), UTF-16, or UTF-32. So not sure if the following is applicable. Nevertheless...
For most apps I would recommend JSON to Object mapping, which will take care of the escaping. Otherwise, you can call Jackson's (the JSON library used by Mule) String escape method directly.
Here's an example that you can use in MEL. String.valueOf is necessary because quoteAsString returns char[]:
<configuration>
<expression-language>
<import class="org.codehaus.jackson.io.JsonStringEncoder" />
<global-functions>
def quoteJSONString(s) {
String.valueOf(JsonStringEncoder.getInstance().quoteAsString(s))
}
</global-functions>
</expression-language>
</configuration>

At the target you can receive the data as text/plain.
Clean it by running :
input.replaceAll("\\p{Cc}", "").
Convert it back to JSON data using any JSON library :
JSONObject inputParams = JSONObject.fromObject(input);
Hope it helps.

Setting a string in a body of httpResponse

I need help. In my current development one of the requirements says:
The server will return 200-OK as a response(httpresponse).
If the panelist is verified then as a result, the server must also
return the panelist id of this panelist.
The server will place the panelist id inside the body of the 200-OK
response in the following way:
<tdcp>
<cmd>
<ack cmd=”Init”>
<panelistid>3849303</panelistid>
</ack>
</cmd>
Now I am able to put the httpresponse as
httpServletResponse.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_OK);
And I can put
String responseToClient= "<tdcp><cmd><ack cmd=”Init”><panelistid>3849303</panelistid></ack></cmd></tdcp>";
Now what does putting the above xml inside the body of 200-OK response mean and how can it be achieved?

You can write the XML directly to the response as follows:
This example uses a ServletResponse.getWriter(), which is a PrintWriter to write a String to the response.
String responseToClient= "<tdcp><cmd><ack cmd=”Init”><panelistid>3849303</panelistid></ack></cmd></tdcp>";
httpServletResponse.setStatus(HttpServletResponse.SC_OK);
httpServletResponse.getWriter().write(responseToClient);
httpServletResponse.getWriter().flush();

You simply need to get the output stream (or output writer) of the servlet response, and write to that. See ServletResponse.getOutputStream() and ServletResponse.getWriter() for more details.
(Or simply read any servlet tutorial - without the ability to include data in response bodies, servlets would be pretty useless :)

If that's meant to be XML, Word has already spoiled things for you by changing the attribute quote symbol to ” instead of ".
It is worth having a look at JAXP if you want to generate XML using Java. Writing strings with < etc. in them won't scale and you'll run into problems with encodings of non-ASCII characters.

Special characters in XML response received from server

In my Scala code, I am fetching a response from a server using the getInputStream method of HttpUrlConnection class. The response is XML data. However the data contains HTML entities like & and '.
Is there a way I can replace these characters with their text equivalent so that I can parse the XML properly?

It's necessary to encode those entities in xml so they don't interfere with its syntax. The <(<) and > (>) entities make this more obvious. It would be impossible to parse XML whose content was littered with < and > symbols.
Scala's scala.xml package should give you the tools you need to parse your xml. Here's some guidance from the library's author.