USPS API Shipping Methods Labeling Error On Interspire Cart

[UPDATE:
For the record, I have been an Interspire customer since early 2004 and I have purchased 3 email marketer scripts, 1 knowledge base, 3 shopping carts and 2 shopping carts at the enterprise level through my account and accounts I have setup for my customers. This is somewhere around $5,000 and I'm a small-fry customer to Interspire.

I'm parting ways with Interspire over their key activation policy. You need a key activated to a specific domain to help Interspire reduce fraud. I respect that. What you might not know is that they will not update your key, should you need to move domains or subdomains, without an active support plan on the product, which is $147.50.

If they want to bang on you for $25 bucks or something, sure fine I get that, and I understand that nobody's time is free. But $147.50 for a 12 month support plan? No thank you, I'm taking what small amount of business I do with shopping cart scripts elsewhere. It's not a lot of money, but It makes me feel pushed around, so yes this is an emotional reaction.

I want a shopping cart vendor that sees ME as their customer and not playing gotcha because I needed a simple domain change on the key. Interspire's support plans are tied to the product and not to me and my account. So if I have 5 carts, I need support plans for all 5. That just doesn't work. For what it's worth, the key was expired by 5 weeks and I was changing from the .com to .net of my domain name and I WILL get my cart to work, but I'm going to have to setup a DNS.

]

Here’s the solution you need below. but I do encourage you to think about shopping cart alternatives on your next project.

I notice recently that the USPS shipping method label on my Interspire shopping cart has been returning code like this

Parcel Post^®

Investigating, I learned that the USPS API has recently  been updated to return the registered trademark logo in superscript.   I have zero experience with this API and I didn’t have much time to solve the problem.  Here’s my hacky solution which I adapted from someone else posting this solution for a Magento Cart.

For Interspire Shopping Cart open the file:

/modules/shipping/usps/module.usps.php

At about line 663, find this line of code:

(string)$xml->Package->Postage->MailService

Now comment it out so that it looks like so:

//(string)$xml->Package->Postage->MailService

Directly beneath the above line of code add this new line of code which will do a simple string replacement in order to yank out the registered trademark code that is not parsing correctly.

str_replace("<sup>®</sup>", "", (string)$xml->Package->Postage->MailService)

Your final changes will look like:

//(string)$xml->Package->Postage->MailService
str_replace("<sup>®</sup>", "", (string)$xml->Package->Postage->MailService)

Save and post. That’s it.  I hope you find this useful and please feel free to comment if there are better solutions.