Function inputs and escaping special characters with Unicode

[glorious-beard]

If I set a kernel argument to content containing special characters, (HTML tags, for example), and I look at the logger output from the kernel when it's invoking the function, I notice that the JSON object escapes all of the special character.

For example, if I set "input" to "

Version 1.2

....", the function argument looks like:

{"input":"\u003Cp\u003EVersion 1.2\u003C/p\u003E..."}

Two questions:

1. Do the extra characters in escaping "<" and ">" with 5 additional characters incur extra token cost?
2. Does the function call unescape these characters before it is sent to the LLM endpoint?

[eavanvalkenburg]

Answered here: #7365