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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / How to Unbold text in ...
Power Automate
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How to Unbold text in PAD?

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Posted on by 21
I'm currently using Power Automate Desktop to do some web data extraction, however some of the texts extracted are bold and it is therefore messing up with my flow.
 
Because of the Bold texts, it's causing my flow to automatically stop without showing any error message, specially when I'm using the extracted data with Escaped text!
 
How do I Unbold my text in PAD?
11.jpg
I have the same question (0)
  • UshaJyothiKasibhotla Profile Picture
    225 Moderator on at

    Use send keys activity

    give the variable 

    Hope this helps 

    Usha

  • Absnaky Profile Picture
    21 on at

    Thank you for your response, but can you please elaborate a bit more.

     

    For example, let's say my extracted data was put into the "DataFromWebPage" datatable as show below. What would I do next to get rid of the BOLD parts of the text?

     

    12.jpg

     

  • evilnw Profile Picture
    78 on at

    Try removing HTML tags. You can use Raplace text Action.

    evilnw_1-1701969621138.png

     

     

  • Absnaky Profile Picture
    21 on at

    Thank you for your suggestion. I tried what you said but it did not work unfortunately.

    For some weird reason, every time I extract this particular text with bold contents, the flow automatically stops (without any error message) when it meets actions like "Replace text" or "Get Clipboard text" for example.

     

    I tried using the "Send keys" action to have the extracted text be written onto a notepad. Weirdly it's unable to write the Bold parts of the text and skips it entirely. (See pic below)

     

    What I'm trying to do exactly is to extract the Profile info of a bunch of Instagram accounts and below is a random example of such Insta accounts that has Bold texts that can't be Unbold;
    https://www.instagram.com/eddiecumberb/

     

    rtdt.jpg

  • Agnius Bartninkas Profile Picture
    Most Valuable Professional on at

    That's because those are not text characters. This person specifically created this part of his bio to look like that and also possibly to make life harder for people trying to scrape their page. If you copy it manually to a more advanced text editor, you'll see those are not standard characters:

    Agnius_0-1702019199194.png

    It's not plain text and as such, PAD will not be able to interpret it. Not sure why it causes the flow to fail, when you want to do anything with the text. But it will not recognize this value as a text.

     

    I would thus suggest avoiding it and skipping it when you scrape the pages.

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  • Absnaky Profile Picture
    21 on at
    Thanks for your input and suggestions.
     
    Avoiding those particular Insta accounts with BOLD texts was a bit of a challenge at first because if I have a big list, I would need to go through each account one-by-one to see which ones have those BOLD characters so that I can avoid them.
     
    In the end I was able to come up with 2 potential solutions to my problem!
     
    No. 1. After using the "ExtractDataFromWebpage" action, I would save the data into a notepad using the ANSI code format.
     
    By using this code, if the Insta bio extracted had the BOLD texts in question, those BOLD texts would appear as question marks instead ("????").
     
    I then use an "IF CONDITION" action "CONTAIN", to detect those question marks to know which accounts have those BOLD texts and which ones do not.
     
    By doing it like this, I'm able to avoid those accounts and thus prevent my Subflow from failing.
     
    No. 2. Another pretty good solution to my problem, even though it's not ideal, is to use the "OCR EXTRACT" action.
     
    By using this action, it will extract the words it sees irrespective of whether they are BOLD or not!
     
    And the texts extracted are not bolded.
     
    The downside with the OCR action is that it does not seem to be 100% effective.
    It sometimes misses some words... But nonetheless, a good solution.
  • Agnius Bartninkas Profile Picture
    Most Valuable Professional on at

    OCR is definitely not 100% accurate and I would generally only suggest to use it when everything else fails - like when you need to extract text from images. If you absolutely need this text, it does make sense to use it, as it is otherwise going to be difficult.

     

    An alternative approach to what you said would be using On block error to add error handling if your sub-flow fails, and continue the flow even if a single account fails.

    -------------------------------------------------------------------------
    If I have answered your question, please mark it as the preferred solution. If you like my response, please give it a Thumbs Up.

    I also provide paid consultancy and development services using Power Automate. If you're interested, DM me and we can discuss it.

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