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How do I get flow to stop encoding the ampersand in the href in my anchor tag?

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Posted on by steveshe Microsoft Employee

How do I stop Flow from encoding an ampersand in a link in the body of my message?

I am sending HTML email and in that mail I want to embed a google analytics link, but it wont work because Flow keeps encoding the ampersand ( & ) to ( & ) which breaks the URL.

Here is a sample:

href="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=UX-1345610741-1&cid=XYZ&t=event&ec=email&ea=open&el=12345678&cs=Assignment&cm=email&cn=contoso

But if you look at the source in the body of the mail, it has clearly encided the "&" to be "&":

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
</head>
<body>
Hello,<br>
<br>
<a href="https://www.google-analytics.com/collect?v=1&tid=UX-1345610741-1&cid=XYZ&t=event&ec=email&ea=open&el=12345678&cs=Assignment&cm=email&cn=contoso"></a>
</body>
</html>

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Building flows

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PieterVeenstra 13 on at

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Did you set Is HTML to Yes?

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steveshe Microsoft Employee on at

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Yes. If you dont do that, then I'm pretty sure you just get the HTML as text and no encoding or unencoding happens.

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steveshe Microsoft Employee on at

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Sorry Peter, I just realized from my post you might think that I was getting raw HTML in the visibile portion of the email. That is not the case. I just did a View Source on the email and posted the unrendered HTML body for expositive purposes. It all renders correctly, but the link doesn't work because Google Analytics doesn't understand "&" as an argument seperator.

I need the "&" in the href to be rendered into the body of the email unencoded.

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PieterVeenstra 13 on at

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Hi @steveshe,

I tried sending an email with html and a href that included &s and it just worked. can you copy paste your email body (from the action) into notepad? This creates the exact detailed code and then DM it to me.

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steveshe Microsoft Employee on at

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I just sent it. I think it worked at one point but i can;t figure out what broke it or how to fix it. Let me know if you can see it.

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steveshe Microsoft Employee on at

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I just remembed. I changed the email connector from Outlook.com to Office 365. I had apparently not been paying attention when I filtrered email actions on "Send an Email" and I accidentally selected the Outlook.com conenctor instead of Office 365. It worked, but it caused my flow to get suspended because we have a policy against connecting corporate BI to Outlook.com email. I redid the flow to use Office365 and I think it was after that when I noticed that the link was broken.

Which email connector are you using in your test?

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PieterVeenstra 13 on at

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Here is my example. I went to google searched for fast cars. Then I copeid the url to my email body and replaced my query string with the variable. I'm getting an email with the right link in it.

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steveshe Microsoft Employee on at

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I did it exactly as you did and i get this:
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
</head>
<body>
<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=fast+carsFast Cars&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS731US731&oq=fast+carsFast Cars&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l2j69i60j0l2.1875j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">click link</a>
</body>
</html>

I am starting to think this a problem with Office 365 Mail... I will test with Outlook.

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steveshe Microsoft Employee on at

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Same thing using an Outlook send mail task. I am stumped...
<html><head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii">
</head>
<body>
<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=fast+carsQuery×&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS731US731&oq=fast+carsQuery×&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l2j69i60j0l2.1875j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8">click link</a>
</body>
</html>

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v-yuazh-msft on at

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Hi @ steveshe,

Are you still having this issue now?

If you issue still exists, please share a screenshot of the configuration of your flow, so I could try to help you.

As @ Pieter_Veenstra’s test, I have made a test on my side and don’t have the issue that you mentioned.
The link with “&” always work well on both “Outlook.com” and “Office 365 Outlook” Connector.

Regards,
Alice Zhang

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