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E-mail address with an apostrophe causing flow to fail

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Posted on by smodkins

Hi there,

I have a flow that gets information from a SharePoint list where I am managing an onboarding tracker. The flow sends an individual email to each of the hiring managers once per week with status updates and it's been working fine. Please see the flow below:

This week it's been failing on one record though everyone elses appears to have been sent successfully and the only difference I can see is the manager has an email address with an apostrophe in it.

This is the step it's failing at and the error (with the email address changed for privacy)

Action 'Get_items_Filtered_List' failed: The expression "(LineManager/EMail eq 'Edward.O'Callaghan@powerautomate.com') and ((Status eq '1. Welcome e-mail sent (candidate to complete backchecks)') or (Status eq '2. Candidate completing consent forms') or (Status eq '3. Candidate completed consent forms, checks in production') or (Status eq '4. Backchecks complete, awaiting start date') or (Status eq '5. Start date confirmed, awaiting induction')) and ((BusinessArea eq 'London') or (BusinessArea eq 'Leeds'))" is not valid. Creating query failed.

Any help you can offer would be much appreciated

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Building flows

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trice602 15,404 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Hi @smodkins ,

One way to help work with this name is to use a variable. Then replace the apostrophe with a %27, such as:

replace(triggerOutputs()?['body/FullName'],'''','%27')

Then refer to the variable downstream. This will help you with the apostrophe error you are getting.

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smodkins 85 on at

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Hi trice602,

Thank you for coming back to me! I saw you replied but have been unable to access this thread in the migration to the new experience but it is back now!

Thank you for the suggestion. Can you show me how this would look in a flow? Apologies but I am still quite new to power automate

Thanks in advance

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Chriddle 8,443 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Replacing ' with %27 won't work., because you are checking for equality.

You have to do a Power Automate encoding (which is 2 single quotes).

This expression replaces one single quote with two single quotes in <email>:

replace(<email>, '''', '''''')

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smodkins 85 on at

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Thank you Chriddle.

Do I leave the <email> in the expression just like that or do I need to replace with a field?

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Chriddle 8,443 Super User 2025 Season 2 on at

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Here <email> is a placeholder for the email address.

In your case probaply outputs('Compose_Email_To')

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