Write text to file populating double backslashes

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Posted on by nicklim

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Hi everyone, i can't figure out what is going on with PAD as it is adding extra backslashes to the file path

This is my PAD flow, as you can see it has only one slash between the path

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Srini007 3,490 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Hi @nicklim

Have you tried checking in the text file? because when you see the preview of the output it will always show you as \\, but is the output you are writing is same you are getting as double slash?

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Thanks,

Srini

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CFernandes 8,504 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hey @nicklim

I assume it's adding \\ because it's trying to escape the character in the string. You should get correct result in the file.

see article - https://www.notecasepro.com/help/help_files/notes/OCjeW9GkNnBBagVB2NZ90A.html#:~:text=Characters%20to%20be%20escaped%20include,be%20relevant%20in%20file%20paths.

Reference Text -

On Windows

On Windows, the backslashes in a file path must always be escaped. For example:

    strFileToOpen = "C:\\Tmp\\notecase_tmp.txt"

But on recent versions of Windows, you may optionally use the forward slash as the path directory delimiter without escaping, just as on Unix/Linux:

  strFileToOpen = "C://Tmp/notecase_tmp.txt"

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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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This is just because you get your inputs as a JSON string and backslashes are special characters in JSON that need to be escaped. Escaping is done by using a backslash (that's why it's a special character). If it was a single backslash, it would break the JSON structure. Double backslashes mean it's a single escaped (literal) backslash when you actually parse the JSON.

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nicklim 391 on at

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Hi all, thanks for your input and suggestions. The issue was the in-built powershell script wasn't passing the $email value into the input variable %email% correctly. Hence it failed to write text to file.

The workaround I did was create another cloud and RPA flow, where it pass the email value directly from SharePoint to Power Automate desktop. Seems to be working fine that way.

Thanks again everyone!

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