Remove unwanted characters from String in Power Automate or Logic Apps Tutorial

What if I told you that you can remove unwanted characters from a string using 1 action? Whether it be unwanted symbols, letters or numbers or a combination of all, I will show you a very easy repeatable and efficient method of removing these characters from a string. This is really useful for extracting a number from a string, by keeping only the numbers or for removing symbols to ensure that a filename or folder path is compatible with SharePoint.
You will learn how to use Select action, Chunk, Contains, If and Join expressions and can use this to make your automation super efficient in both Power Automate or Logic Apps.
00:00 Intro
00:25 Build a flow to identify character matches
01:40 Create an array with Chunk
02:27 Using contains to identify if a character exists
04:23 Remove unwanted characters
05:14 Return the new string with Join
06:28 Keep numbers only
08:20 Summary of flow build
Got an idea? Or video request? Drop me a note here forms.office.com/r/4EqE7VHVfH 👍
Want to buy me a coffee www.buymeacoffee.com/DamoBird365 ☕

[@jamesclark2020]

Love these efficient flows Damien. 👍

[@DamoBird365]

Thank you James 👍

[@mounikakoppadi5751]

Wow, this video is incredibly useful and informative!

[@DamoBird365]

Thanks Mounika 🙏

[@anjanchidige]

Excellent tip

[@SowmiyaRavichandran-pz7ep]

Thanks for the amazing video🤩🤩

[@DamoBird365]

Thank you Sowmiya 👍🤩

[@paulblum4369]

I have been unable to get the string that we started with back into an array! MS Forms automatically put in string forms with odd characters like '/' separating commas. Tried to get rid of the /, but it just showed back up in the final product and seems to have stayed a string when I would like for it to become an array of separate strings.

[@DamoBird365]

Multi choice? www.damobird365.com/easily-address-escaped-characters-in-forms-response/

[@Andyr010]

Another great example, perfectly explained. After stumbling upon your channel I have learned so much!
I have another related use case with accented characters or needing to select based upon ASCII range of permitted characters. Would it be as simple as entering all the accented characters? What if I wanted to do more of a replace so the output still made sense, just that accented letters are replaced by a non-accented equivalent letter?

[@DamoBird365]

Cheers Andy, I reckon you could swap them out with something a bit like this. Drop me a dm and I can share the idea and if it works I can do a video for everyone else 👍

[@jlchen3135]

Thanks for many good video's. I tried to use chatgpt analysis the content/body of an email when it arrives. I am struggling with the issue that the body of the email contains not only the new message replied by the sender, but also old email conversation. could you please advice or make a video on how one can just capture the current email message body?

[@jerometurmel4208]

Congratulations on your excellent work. I've observed your frequent use of the new editor and was wondering if you've encountered any challenges with it. In my experience, I've noticed expressions randomly disappearing within the Outlook connector, which raises concerns about its reliability for professional use. What are your insights on this matter?

[@DamoBird365]

Thank you very much. Ultimately I took the plunge with the new designer as it’s here to stay but agree there are still teething problems. My advice is to feedback your findings. If you can document on a forum post or use the direct feedback in Power Automate. I’ve fed back many as a result of my deep dives and even highlighted a few in my videos. Today I had the compose adopt the name of the previously inserted compose which caused an error but I removed it from the video.

[@kylerayner1103]

Great video. I have this same thing in a flow. What if you wanted to replace specific text instead of a blank. For instance, double quote symbol " gets replaced with the text double quotes. Is there a way to map the symbols to what you want to replace with?

[@DamoBird365]

Like an accent on an a ? á = a ? I did build a demo but never recorded. You can create an object and use the key to replace individual characters.

[@kylerayner1103]

@@DamoBird365 still a list of characters, but each character could be replaced by something else that is not a symbol.

[@DamoBird365]

@kylerayner1103 a single character for a single character? It’s all down to chunking the string into an array.

[@zahsam09]

Hey Damien, Thanks for the amazing video (as usual 😊)
I have a use case where I need to extract the ID from an email subject which is always going to be in the following format:
ITxxxxx where x is an integer. any thoughts?

[@DamoBird365]

You could definitely give this a go on isint() for the subject, as I demo in the video. Let me know how you get on.

[@zahsam09]

Yes I thought so, IsInt would tackle the integer issue, but there is prefix ‘IT’ as well, any thoughts on that?🙂

[@DamoBird365]

You could either concat IT back onto it or maybe if the ID is always in the same place, try a different technique and split on a space.

[@inspectorlife85]

Good stuff!! Is there a way to use Power Automate to run Power Quary in the evening? Is that a simple automate? 😊

[@DamoBird365]

A recurrence trigger? And refresh dataflow action? Would that work.

[@inspectorlife85]

@@DamoBird365 yes, we have a database that needs to refresh in the evening and I was hoping to have power automate automatically run it at a specific time each night.

[@andrewjameson5918]

I could have done with that yesterday to get 1000 out of $1000 - Silver Level to then use the 1000 as an integer.

[@DamoBird365]

That would have been a pretty nice test for it 👍

[@michal4561]

If only regex would be added😢

[@DamoBird365]

Now that’s an interesting challenge, office scripts or custom connector using c# are the current options that I know of other than 3rd party.