Concat issues

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Posted on by abonsey

Hi All,

I'm having issues with concat placed with and email send v2.

This works: concat('Gift 2: Alcohol Gift ',outputs('Home_Address')?['body/r6036d107afcb425faf8518eab85f348f'])

This works: if(equals(substring(outputs('Home_Address')?['body/r59ccb065f2e84f9dac89313e4c80ce66'], 0, indexof(outputs('Home_Address')?['body/r59ccb065f2e84f9dac89313e4c80ce66'],' - ')), 'Alcohol Gift'),concat('Gift 2: Alcohol Gift ','ab'), '')

But this doesn't: if(equals(substring(outputs('Home_Address')?['body/r59ccb065f2e84f9dac89313e4c80ce66'], 0, indexof(outputs('Home_Address')?['body/r59ccb065f2e84f9dac89313e4c80ce66'],' - ')), 'Alcohol Gift'),concat('Gift 2: Alcohol Gift ',outputs('Home_Address')?['body/r6036d107afcb425faf8518eab85f348f']), '')

Any ideas why when I run a test on the flow I get the error:
Action 'Send_an_email_(V2)' failed: Unable to process template language expressions in action 'Send_an_email_(V2)' inputs at line '0' and column '0': 'The template language function 'substring' parameters are out of range: 'start index' and 'length' must be non-negative integers and their sum must be no larger than the length of the string. Please see https://aka.ms/logicexpressions#substring for usage details.'.

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David_MA 13,908 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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The issue with your Power Automate expression lies in the `indexof` function. If the substring `' - '` is not found in the `Home_Address` output, `indexof` will return `-1`, causing the `substring` function to fail and resulting in an invalid expression error. To handle this, you can add a condition to check if `' - '` exists in the `Home_Address` output before using `substring`. This can be done by using the `contains` function to ensure the substring is present. If it is, the `substring` function will execute safely.

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Chriddle 8,634 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

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Instead of substring(...) use the following to get the string up to the first "-":
first(split(outputs('Home_Address')?['body/r59ccb065f2e84f9dac89313e4c80ce66'], '-'))

or, if outputs('Home_Address')?['body/r59ccb065f2e84f9dac89313e4c80ce66'] might be null:
first( split( coalesce( outputs('Home_Address')?['body/r59ccb065f2e84f9dac89313e4c80ce66'], '' ), '-' ) )

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