What kind of encoding is this: \x3Cb\x3E\x3C?

I'm receiving data from an 开发者_C百科AJAX request, and it's really weird. I thought it was unicode, but unicode's codes are like \u00E7 (ç).

\x3Cb\x3E\x3C

What do you think this is? And how can I convert it to normal text with Java?

Thank you

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It might be plain ASCII. \x3Cb\x3E\x3C decodes to <b><.

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html entities it is. So you have html content embedded in your ajax hash. what language you are using? there should be several encode/decode anyway. RoR has it for sure, in .NET is use the JSON.NET lib to decode.