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non-ASCII characters in file content

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Hello all,

I've recently stumbled across, in my opinion, a difficult problem. I'm currently working on an automated flow, which gets an attachment(s) from received email. It then checks whether it's an archive, containing .xls(x) file or simply an .xls(x) file. If it's an archive, then it extracts it in a temporary folder and copies extracted file to a shared network drive. Otherwise it instantly saves the .xls(x) file to a shared network drive.

The problem is, that in some cases the content of these .xls(x) files might contain non-ASCII characters, so I need to check if they exist and if they do, replace them with ASCII characters. I don't have much experience with Flows and so far I haven't found any solution to this problem. The only thing I came up with is to write a custom controller that connects to my own API, which handles all the editing, but I don't know if such scenario is possible using Flows.

All kind of help is appreciated regarding the question!

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Building flows

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abm abm 32,858 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @Anonymous

You can call API's via HTTP flow actions. You can then pass the parameters and get the output back as a response. Flow trigger can be either scheduled or when a file is created in onedrive or SharePoint. Also Flow can connect on-premise via gateways.

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Hi @abm ,

Thank you very much for your reply. Yeah, I've read in the documentation, that I can call API's via HTTP, but the thing I want to know is if writing my own API and accessing it via HTTP is the best solution for this problem. Maybe there are any connectors that would be of use to me in this scenario?

Also I want to intagrate this part to my current flow and not create a different one (the process is now Extract file -> Save to Network Drive, but what I have in mind is Extract File --> Fix non-ASCII characters --> Save to Network Drive).

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abm abm 32,858 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi,

What's the process for removing the ASCII characters? Flow can read excel file rows. Flow have Replace expression function. Flow can get attachments from email and save to a specified directory (Onedrive, SharePoint, etc). Are you getting collection of files in zip format? Then there is a flow step called One drive - extract folder. Please see this post.

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/auto-unarchive-files/

Not sure what's your logic in API is going to be? If it's too much string manipulation then custom API is the right way to go otherwise you end up having a long flow solution if possible.

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Usually only one archived file is received as attachment, but sometimes there can be a couple of them in one archive. Nevertheless, I've already implemented file extraction and saving in Flows and it is working as expected. The main problem I'm facing now is content manipulation.

So far we did not think about our API logic in-depth, because first we want to know what solution is the optimal one. But from your answers and a couple of hours reading documentation I came to conclusion that a custom API and Connector for us is the answer, since there will be a significant amount of string manipulations involved.

Thank you for your help @abm !

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