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Power Virtual Agents - Rendering line breaks on bot messages

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Posted on 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 " ", "", etc., but HTML does not seem to work.

Which formats are supported for line breaks?

Thanks,

Agustín

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CU22081450-0 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hi @adafieno ,

Did you try to use " "?

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adafieno Microsoft Employee on at

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Thanks for your answer, Renato. I did try " " and " ", but no luck.

I am sure that I am missing something.

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MarKol on at

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HTML tags won't work in WebChat control. But if you are returning text that you trying to format into multiple lines from Power Automate, you can try using markdown tags instead of HTML tags.

To force a line break, try placing 2 empty spaces at the end of the String. There are generally a couple of ways to do this in markdown notation, see which one will work for you.

Here are the references to markdown syntax on line breaks:
https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/#line-breaks
https://markdown-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/basics.html#line-return

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adafieno Microsoft Employee on at

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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.

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MarKol on at

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Did you use /s/s markdown tag to indicate a double empty space?

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adafieno Microsoft Employee on at

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Thanks. Yes, I did use "/s/s", and also "\s\s" which is what the documentation you sent me says.

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cabata 314 Most Valuable Professional on at

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

%0A

is equals to break

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adafieno Microsoft Employee on at

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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.

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cabata 314 Most Valuable Professional on at

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@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 with %0A%0A and in a compose action you can see a line break the you can send your output response to PA again.

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adafieno Microsoft Employee on at

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Thanks, Christian. That did it. Much appreciated.

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