Is it possible to output UTF-16 LE encoded files or email attachments?

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Posted on by wards_ada

Hi all,

First off, I am a beginner, so thank you for bearing with me. With that said, I have a cloud-based flow that:

retrieves responses from an MS Form
creates a CSV table from selected response data
then I use compose actions to get the exact output style I need
then I turn that compose output into a Send email (v2) attachment as a .txt file using this input:

This text file goes to a mailbox to be imported into FileMaker Pro software that only handles UTF-16 LE encoded files. The problem is that the text file the flow creates is encoded UTF-8 and does not import properly into the software.

Does anyone know if there is anything I can do in the flow that would allow me to send this file with UTF-16 LE encoding to match output from the legacy form I am hoping to replace?

I have solved all my other problems with other flows by reading this community, so huge thank you to everyone who contributes!

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Building flows

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lbendlin 8,711 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Does your original text have non-ANSI characters? LE is basically just BOM followed by your character followed by zero , then next character, then zero etc. Unless you have actual UTF-8 encoded characters...

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wards_ada on at

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I don't believe so, there does not appear to be any real reason that the legacy system was set up to use UTF-16 LE, but the CSV files are added to an ongoing database that has always utilized that encoding. When I tried importing the CSV file generated by Power Automate it displayed incorrectly in the software the users are working with, so that's why I started researching a way to get the encoding to match without having to manually download the file and convert it using another program before importing it.

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lbendlin 8,711 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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So give it a try. Use the FFFE BOM, and then iterate through all the characters in your source text and write them to the output with a 00 in between

The Unicode Standard, Version 15.0

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