Remove junk characters

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Posted on by tc839

Hey all,

I'm trying to copy text from one word doc to another.

I use the ReadFromWordDocument action then crop the text I want to extract.

Problem is I seem to be getting some junk characters along with the actual text. Which are displayed as rectangles.

Here is the source doc

Does anyone know what the rectangles are, and if there's an easy way to remove them. (Due to organisations policies I can't use any scripts apart from powershell)

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Power Automate Desktop

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VishnuReddy1997 2,656 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi @tc839 ,

You can try 2 methods.

1. Using PAD actions.
Add the Replace Text action to your flow.
In the Text field, input the variable that holds your text (the output of your ReadFromWordDocument action).
In the Find what field, input the regular expression that matches the characters you want to remove. For non-printable characters, you can try "[^\x20-\x7E]" which represents all characters outside the printable ASCII range.
Leave the Replace with field empty to remove the matched characters.
The Replace Text action will output a new text variable which should be free of the unwanted characters.
2. Powershell Script Method
In PowerShell, you can use the -replace operator to remove these characters. Here’s a simple example:
$text = ReadFromWordDocument -Path "path_to_your_document"
$cleanText = $text -replace "[^\x00-\x7F]", ""
(Note:- if you got your solution you can mark as solution and gives kudos)

Thanks & Regards
Vishnu Reddy

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tc839 54 on at

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Thanks but that didn't seem to work.
Also you can't leave the Replace with field empty, it throws an error. Unless I'm missing something....

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Deenuji_Loganathan_ 6,250 Moderator on at

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@tc839

Try like below screenshot:

Thanks,
Deenuji Loganathan 👩‍💻
Automation Evangelist 🤖
Follow me on LinkedIn 👥

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tc839 54 on at

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Thanks that's working now

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