Escaping JSON Invalid Characters

[Mattw112IG]

Has anyone already built a flow to escape invalid characters in JSON?

I'm going to build it but thought I would check first.

Thanks,

Terry

[SCTdan]

Can you explain a bit more what you're trying to do?  Post example data if you have any

[Mattw112IG]

In Flow I was creating SharePoint site pages using HTTP Rest.

The Description field I was passing has characters that JSON considers invalid characters.

In order to use those characters they have to be escaped.  typically with a backslash.

Quotation mark (") \"
Backslash (\) \\
Slash (/) \/
Backspace \b
Form feed \f
New line \n
Carriage return \r
Horizontal tab \t

as well as some control characters like '  \u2019

Anyway, it was simple replace operation, although I used multiple compose.

But was just wondering if someone already had something.  Since I didn't see anything I just moved ahead.

Thanks,

Terry

[SCTdan]

Gotcha.  Yea I've always just used replace() as well for that.

[Mattw112IG]

There's just a bunch of them, so was hoping to copy and paste 😉

One lesson learned for anyone reading this though:

Do the backslash replace first, before escaping the others, otherwise the backslash replaces the escape backslashes. lol.  so you end up getting \\\ or \\/ instead of what it should be.

Oh second lesson learned. I already knew this, but didn't think about it until was testing.. there are multiple types of double quotes.  You have to escape/convert all of them (“,”,") to the standard \"

Terry

[MortenT]

There should be a function that does all the replacement.. Right??

Has anyone found that one?

[Dan_Hibbert]

I agree that would be nice but in lieu of that hope fully this will help.

replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(<string_data>,'\','\\'),'/','\/'),'"','\"'),'“','\"'),'”','\"')

It does make for a gnarly function but I think that takes what @Mattw112IG suggested and implements (with the replaces in the right order so you don't end escaping \" to \\" which then creates an invalid json string)

[gayathri]

This expression also gives the same error. Has anyone come up with anyother solution for this? Thanks in advance

[cougs]

I struggled with this very recently, just getting back into MS Flow.

I "think" (without requisite complex testing) that the simplest solution is to use the "Escape text for regular expression" function but then correct the (very silly) space escapes.

I've found using this sequence seems to work OK (by way of example):

    Text.EscapeForRegularExpression Text: Description EscapedText=> Description

    Text.Replace Text: Description TextToFind: $'''\\\\\\s''' IsRegEx: True IgnoreCase: False ReplaceWith: $'''%' '%''' ActivateEscapeSequences: False Result=> Description

The Flows (Power Automate) UI makes life kind of horrible, because you can't enter simple things like:

- a BLANK character (PA complains you didn't supply a value, when a blank is entered) so you must use %' '% to represent a blank - took me a while to find that one.

- When adding quoted lines to the JSON payload, you can't specify "%My_Value_To_Be_Quoted%" in-situ. You have to do this outside of the Invoke WebService call - in a Set variable call - and substitute the naked  result (now quoted) string in the JSON payload.

So weird and, frankly, brain dead.

[pmesiha]

check this solution, it should help

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/power-automate-easy-way-generate-json-objects-peter-mesiha-p-eng

[cougs]

That's ok for Power Automate "web" but for Power Automate Desktop I recommend my solution above, seems to work ok and is simple enough (WHY, OH WHY are they so different?! Microsoft, what are you thinking ????)