How to preserve newline characters during variable extract and assignment

[#1]

I'm trying to consume JSON from target endpoint response, remove unwanted elements and returning a custom JSON payload to the client.

One of the elements in the JSON that I get from the target endpoint has /n and /r characters

"description": "Overview\r\n\r\nCurrent State -Some Text\r\n\r\n Some Other Text"

I extract "description" into a variable called descriptionFromTarget and create a new payload with the element called "myDescription"

        <Payload contentType="application/json" variableSuffix="#" variablePrefix="@">
                    {
                        "myDescription":"@descriptionFromTarget#",
                    }
            </Payload>

The problem is that the /n and /r characters are not preserved but the string is converted to a multilne string. So myDescription looks like this

 "Overview
  Current State -Some Text
 Some Other Text"

This of course is invalid format.

How do I preserve the /n and /r characters during the extraction and assignment so that the content is exactly like it is in the JSON response from target?

[#2]

Related Question

How do I preserve the URL coming form target ?

Here's what I get from target

https://mydomain.com/secure/attachment/79572/image-2018-05-14-16-39-27-484.png

But after extraction and assignment I get

"https: \/\/mydomain.com\/secure\/attachment\/79572\/image-2018-05-14-16-39-27-484.png"

[#3 · Accepted solution]

I ended using the javascript for extraction and creation of response by using the javascript callout. Much simpler.

[dchiesa1]

Just a footnote - you don't need the prefix and suffix.

you can convert this:

<Payload contentType="application/json" variableSuffix="#" variablePrefix="@">
        {
            "myDescription":"@descriptionFromTarget#",
        }
</Payload>

...to this:

<Payload contentType="application/json">{
  "myDescription":"{descriptionFromTarget}"
}
</Payload>