Unable to decode file content

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Posted on by elsiegit

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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Business Process Flows

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Answers (1)

elsiegit 8 on at

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Unable to decode file content

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
Verified answer

Ellis Karim 11,069 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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Unable to decode file content

Try the following, using the Attachments property in an Apply to each loop:

base64ToString(items('Apply_to_each')?['contentBytes'])

Ellis

Ellis Karim's Blog – IT doesn't have to be complicated!