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Power Virtual Agents - Rendering line breaks on bot messages

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Posted on 9 Jun 2020 18:29:03 by adafieno Microsoft Employee

Hi,

I have string values returned from Power Automate that contain line breaks expressed as "\n" within the text. I tried several alternatives to replace those with "<br>", "</br>", etc., but HTML does not seem to work.

Which formats are supported for line breaks?

Thanks,

Agustín

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Answers (1)

DLW-at-H on 09 Dec 2023 at 01:54:37

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Re: Power Virtual Agents - Rendering line breaks on bot messages

For those coming late to the party, you should know that as at end 2023 pva copilot does not seem to support anything like encode/decode. I got this to work by using something like Plaintext("text1<p>text2")
adafieno Microsoft Employee on 10 Nov 2020 at 15:08:19

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Re: Power Virtual Agents - Rendering line breaks on bot messages

Sure, @HackManFrank. As suggested by @ChristianAbata, in Power Automate, I used the uriComponentToString function to replace "\n" with the HTML URL encoding for line feed, as follows:

uriComponentToString(replace(variables('return_sample'),'\n','%0A%0A'))

I hope it helps.
HackManFrank 2 on 10 Nov 2020 at 13:01:58

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Re: Power Virtual Agents - Rendering line breaks on bot messages

Hey @adafieno.
Can you tell me, how exactly you got it working? I seem to misunderstand some of the details regarding the function expression used in the solution post.

Thank you
adafieno Microsoft Employee on 15 Jun 2020 at 22:38:08

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Re: Power Virtual Agents - Rendering line breaks on bot messages

Thanks, Christian. That did it. Much appreciated.
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cabata 314 Most Valuable Professional on 15 Jun 2020 at 22:23:58

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Re: Power Virtual Agents - Rendering line breaks on bot messages

@adafieno did you try encoding uri? https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Building-Flows/Replace-Newline-in-Flow-Expression/td-p/57333

In this example the user is deleteing a line break.

see in PA you an encode an decode uri, so you can replace <br> with %0A%0A and in a compose action you can see a line break the you can send your output response to PA again.
adafieno Microsoft Employee on 15 Jun 2020 at 21:09:47

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Re: Power Virtual Agents - Rendering line breaks on bot messages

Thanks for your suggestion, Christian. That type of encoding doesn't work either.
It seems like the problem lies within the rendering component of Power Virtual Agents. It looks like it's not able to parse and render line breaks.
cabata 314 Most Valuable Professional on 15 Jun 2020 at 19:54:56

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Re: Power Virtual Agents - Rendering line breaks on bot messages

hi @adafieno did you use encoding html https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.ASP

%0A

is equals to break
adafieno Microsoft Employee on 09 Jun 2020 at 19:49:15

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Re: Power Virtual Agents - Rendering line breaks on bot messages

Thanks. Yes, I did use "/s/s", and also "\s\s" which is what the documentation you sent me says.
MarKol on 09 Jun 2020 at 19:42:07

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Re: Power Virtual Agents - Rendering line breaks on bot messages

Did you use /s/s markdown tag to indicate a double empty space?
adafieno Microsoft Employee on 09 Jun 2020 at 19:10:30

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Re: Power Virtual Agents - Rendering line breaks on bot messages

Thanks. That doesn't work either. It just renders two spaces wherever there's a "\n" string.

I need a way to insert actual line break characters into the string to render correctly in markdown. The double spaces force the new line, but it assumes that the text has a line break in the end.