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UTF-8 "%EF%BB%BF" included in URL string causing errors...

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Posted on by Blakepd

I recently started testing some processes in Power Automate Desktop and ran into an issue. I and looping through an excel file's data and launching Edge to add an attachment on a web page (API not available). The URL parameters will be based off of the excel file's contents & I used a python script to add leading zeros to one of the numbers because I didn't know of another way other than VBScript/JavaScript/Python/PowerShell. When the full string is compiled it looks good, but when used to launch the URL it adds "Parameter=%EF%BB%BF000000342563" which causes an error in loading the correct page.

I can't figure out how to get rid of the "%EF%BB%BF" UTF-8 Byte order mark. I don't know if it's a bug when using python 2 with Power Automate but I'm lost.

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Power Automate Desktop

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BTJC99 23 on at

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I'm running into the same exact issue. I am looping through a list created from the action "read text from file". Then I use these variables to navigate to a web address. However, all of the variables in the list contain the utf-8 byte mark and I do not know how to remove them. Does anyone have a solution for this?
Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi @BTJC99 , @Blakepd ,

Have you tried escaping % with one more %%
In PAD % is a reserved character.
Example:
%EF%BB%BF --> %%EF%%BB%%BF

Hope this helps 🙂
Blakepd 10 on at

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I never found a solution using python, however I switched to Visual Basic doing the same thing and it seemed to work fine. Kind of frustrating but hey, gotta use what works.
BTJC99 23 on at

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Thanks for your tip. I tried using a Javascript function and it seems to work fine now. Must be some sort of bug in PAD for python. Hopefully they get that fixed. In the meantime I will continue to use Javascript.
peb9 2 on at

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for all who still running into this problem because it's not fixed by Microsoft: (fix this !!)

You can solve this with an additional "text replace" step, just replace the UTF-8 BOM Character(\ufeff) with a empty string(%''%), works with regex: