Special characters removed fom .txt after getting file from Sharepoint

[luke08156]

Hi there,

i tried to get a .txt fike from sharepoint. This file is an attachment from an email send to a teams channel. When i try to get it into my flow, PowerAutomate encodes the body content of the file in base64. This converting takes place on the server without a possibility to edit any parameters. It only converts ASCII letters. My text contains letters like ßöäü which have no representation in ASCII. Is there any possibility to set the encoding to UTF-8 or equal? Setting the header attribute for UTF8 encoding changed the reply from server, but not the encoding. I also cant replace the respective character, because every letter is getting replaced with � instead of the ASCII representation of the letter.

Thank you for your reply

[nitishsh91 · Accepted solution]

Hi @luke08156 

When the Power Automate flow retrieves the .txt file from SharePoint, it converts the file's content to base64 encoding, which does not support certain special characters like ß, ö, ä, and ü.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to change the encoding to UTF-8 on the server side within Power Automate. However, there are a few workarounds that you can try:

1. Use a different tool to convert the base64 encoded content to UTF-8 before using it in your flow. For example, you could use a script or an online base64 decoder that supports UTF-8.

2. Use the "Compose" action in Power Automate to convert the base64 encoded content to a string and then use the "Parse JSON" action to convert the string to a JSON object. This will allow you to access the individual characters of the text and replace the special characters with their corresponding ASCII representations.

3. If the file is a .txt file and not a binary file, you can use the sharepoint connector to get the file content as a string and use the "Compose" action to convert it to a string.

4. If possible, you could also try to change the encoding of the original file before it is sent to SharePoint. This could be done by using a different tool to save the file with the UTF-8 encoding before it is attached to the email and sent to the Teams channel.

It's worth noting that depending on the nature of the text you are working with and the use case, it might be better to store the text in a different format, like JSON or XML, that supports UTF-8 encoding.

[GUIDARA]

I'm new to the power automate world, there are examples of how I can put this string transformation the number 3.