Escape special character '&' (ampersand)

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Posted on by Niraj466

Hello,

I do have value with special character ('&').

Value : 'D&E_Transactions'

I'm using action : 'Invoke web service" parsing the above value.

As the '&' symbol within the value is considered as special character, it is generating status code 400 with webservice response as long HTML format error.

How can I escape '&' to parse here?

I already tried with the action 'Escape text for regular expression' and action 'Replace text' by '&'. But none of these are working.

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Power Automate Desktop

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Expiscornovus 33,194 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @Niraj466,

I have seen some people suggesting that you need to encode it twice when interacting with the Web API. Haven't tried it myself but it is worth a shot, right?

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Apps-Ideas/WebAPI-retrieveMultiple-with-special-characters-like-amp/idi-p/223515

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9292865/what-is-url-encoding-2526

Can you try the below instead of the ampersand to see if that works?

%2526

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Pavel_NaNoi 1,074 on at

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you can escape a character by putting %'s & double-quotes around it, e.g. %"&"% for things like this.

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Niraj466 73 on at

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Thanks @Pavel_NaNoi .
I tried the syntex you suggested here.

It is still throwing 404 error either with single quotes/double quotes.

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Niraj466 73 on at

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Thank you @Expiscornovus .

I tried with '%2526', but it also doesn't work.
I used %% to escape single % which gave syntax error.
I also tried by applying '%' at both the side.
Tried with single encoded too as suggested in above blog.

Nothing is working here. I'm not sure which syntax should work here.

Just to clarify, api call is working perfectly for the case without special character like '&'.

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Kresimir_RPA 286 on at

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Have you tried to set the whole url into variable and then passing it into Invoke Url section as one variable?

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Niraj466 73 on at

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@Kresimir_RPA
Yes, I tried now all above scenarios by storing value as NewVar using Set variable and passing it to Invoke Url.

But still not expected output.

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Niraj466 73 on at

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I'm getting error as below :
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>Runtime Error</title>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" />
<style>
body {font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:normal;font-size: .7em;color:black;}
p {font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:normal;color:black;margin-top: -5px}
b {font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:bold;color:black;margin-top: -5px}
H1 { font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:normal;font-size:18pt;color:red }
H2 { font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:normal;font-size:14pt;color:maroon }
pre {font-family:"Consolas","Lucida Console",Monospace;font-size:11pt;margin:0;padding:0.5em;line-height:14pt}
.marker {font-weight: bold; color: black;text-decoration: none;}
.version {color: gray;}
.error {margin-bottom: 10px;}
.expandable { text-decoration:underline; font-weight:bold; color:navy; cursor:pointer; }
@media screen and (max-width: 639px) {
pre { width: 440px; overflow: auto; white-space: pre-wrap; word-wrap: break-word; }
}
@media screen and (max-width: 479px) {
pre { width: 280px; }
}
</style>
</head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<span><H1>Server Error in '/' Application.<hr width=100% size=1 color=silver></H1>
<h2> <i>Runtime Error</i> </h2></span>
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, SunSans-Regular, sans-serif ">
<b> Description: </b>An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.
<br><br>
<b>Details:</b> To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a <customErrors> tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This <customErrors> tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".<br><br>
<table width=100% bgcolor="#ffffcc">
<tr>
<td>
<code><pre>

<configuration>
<system.web>
<customErrors mode="Off"/>
</system.web>
</configuration></pre> </code>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<br>
<b>Notes:</b> The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's <customErrors> configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.<br><br>
<table width=100% bgcolor="#ffffcc">
<tr>
<td>
<code><pre>

<configuration>
<system.web>
<customErrors mode="RemoteOnly" defaultRedirect="mycustompage.htm"/>
</system.web>
</configuration></pre> </code>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
<br>
</font>
</body>
</html>

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