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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / Unable to decode file ...
Power Automate
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Unable to decode file content

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Posted on by 8
Hi,
 
Long time listener, first time caller.
 
(1) I have a flow which is grabbing a TAB delimited file (saved with a .CSV extension) from an email attachment, this is the current / latest version. Content type: application/csv
(2) It's and also grabbing the previous version of the same report from SharePoint using 'Get file content using path'. Content type: application/octet-stream
 
When I built and tested the flow using get file content from OneDrive for business, it was working fine.
 
Now, the data returned from both actions is not human readable, I have tried both base64ToString and decodeBase64 functions but neither will make any difference; I have also tried changing 'Infer content type' parameter from 'true' to 'false'.
 
 
 
 
 
 
The output of all four 'Compose' actions looks exactly like this:
 
 
Any suggestions gratefully received, thanks in advance.
 
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  • Verified answer
    Ellis Karim Profile Picture
    12,024 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at
    Try the following, using the Attachments property in an Apply to each loop:
     
     

     
     
    base64ToString(items('Apply_to_each')?['contentBytes'])
     
     
    Ellis
     
  • elsiegit Profile Picture
    8 on at
    Thank you for the suggestion, Ellis. Unfortunately it didn't make any difference. I think the file I am trying to ingest isn't compatible with base64ToString function, possibly due to the Byte Order Mark included? Specs are:
     
    • IBM® Cognos® Analytics can produce reports in CSV format so you can open them in other applications, such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software.

       

      Reports saved in CSV format

    • support Unicode data across many client operating systems
    • are UTF-16 Little Endian data encoded
    • include a BOM (Byte Order Mark) at the beginning of the file
    • are tab-delimited
    • do not enclose strings in quotation marks
    • use a new line character to delimit rows

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