Dropdown default value inconsistent

[trashheap]

At my wits end on this!

I have a dropdown with some static values in the 'items' field.  I'm attempting to set the 'default' value from a global variable that has had its value sourced from a PowerAutomate flow.  I'm 100% positive the flow is returning values as expected.  But the default value in the dropdown only works for some values, but not others.  😵  

For example.  

- The dropdown will have several possible static values --> ["Please Select","Board","Director","Executive","Graduate","Lead","Manager","Team Member"]

- On my screen, when a person in a gallery is selected (via mouse click) a "set" function calls a Flow which returns the value from a directory for the person selected.  I have displayed this value as a label right next to my dropdown so I can 100% confirm its value.  The value is 100% correct and reliable.

- The bizzare part: If the returned value is "Director" or "Manager" the default dropdown value applies as expected.  If the returned value is any other value in this list, the default value is "Please Select" (the first in the list) and the expected default value is NOT applied.  This odd behaviour is pretty reliable in its bizzare way.  Why would some values work, and others not?!

I have tried everything I can think of to work around this issue.  But I just cant fathom the logic.  It would be better if the mechanism just didn't work at all.  But the fact that it works for some values reliably and not others is driving me around the bend!

Thanks in advance.

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and its not the values mismatching.  I have confirmed the values and also tried "trim" and "plaintext" etc to be sure its not some strange encoding or something.

[trashheap · Accepted solution]

After a vast amount of head scratching, it turns out that the data has some sort of (as yet) unidentified encoding in it.   I couldn't find what it was and so far have not seen/witnessed it.  However, using the following code was able to weed out the unknown text and the default field worked again as expected.

Concat(
    Filter(Split(YourFieldHere,""),
    IsMatch(Result,"^[a-zA-Z0-9\s]*$")),
    Result
    )