Flow- Word Merge adds extra line

Carol Grant

I have an acknowledgement flow set up. I have a string variable that pulls in the preferred address lines from get a constituent.

I have the pref address lines then pref city, pref state, etc. I put the string variable into the Populate Word Template.

When someone has more than 1 address line it adds an extra line. I CANNOT figure out how to get rid of this. I've searched the community and RE Facebook group and no one had answers there either.

Here is an example:

Roger Rabbit
PO Box 999567

4 Bunny Lane 18th Floor
St. Catharines, ON L2R7A7
Canada

It looks fine in the Flow when I review the output from the last run. No extra line.

This is one plain text control in Word with the allow carriage returns marked.

Has this happened to anyone else? What was your fix? Do I need to do a long expression with if statements for this?

Thanks,

Carol

Carol Grant

As I was investigating more- it seems in the API it adds a new line/line return in the preferred address lines:

"address_lines": "PO Box 999567\\r\\n4 Bunny Lane 18th Floor",

so somehow I need to replace the \\r\\n with just a “\\n” perhaps…

Alex Wong

@Carol Grant
\\r\\n or \\n is only going to do 1 newline character, so it shouldn't be.

however, it doesn't hurt to try. so you can try replacing \\r\\n with a non-special character first and see how it behaves. (i.e. just a “dash” (-) character)

the expectation would be PO Box 999567-4 Bunny Lane 18th Floor

Carol Grant

@Alex Wong-

I actually found this solution and it works great. The /r/n is this: decodeUriComponent('%0D%0A') and then you replace it with a new line which is this: decodeUriComponent('%0A')

replace(outputs('Get_a_constituent')?['body/address/address_lines'],decodeUriComponent('%0D%0A'),decodeUriComponent('%0A'))

Now I just need to find a way to remove the line where there isn't a country listed.

Alex Wong

@Carol Grant
what I do with address is, I do not have separate “input field” for each (address line, city, state, zip, country), instead I just have ONE input field that is multi-line “block”. Then in power automate, I'll craft the address block, so for country that is blank (or United States), I will not append a newline charcter follow by country.

Carol Grant

@Alex Wong- that is sort of what I'm doing, see below.

I'm not using the Formatted Address in Get Constituent.

Line 1= Addressee Name with a hard return in the variable.

Line 2= Address Lines with the replace for the /r/n

Line 3- Variable to add a comma to City then State and Zip Code

Line 4- Country if it says United States leave blank else Country.

Many of these are wanted by my Gift Processing team, the City and comma, don't show United States if it appears.

Do you add the line return differently, I just put a hard return in the string variable. I'd love to see how others are doing it.

Alex Wong

@Carol Grant
if there is expectation for a specific “field” to be potentially blank and newline needed or not based on that, then you have to account for them in expression.

Specifically for conntry, it will be right after the “zip/post code” but don't hit “enter” to go to next line. use expression to condition @{if(or(equals(country_field,'United States'),empty(country_field)), ‘’, concat(expression_for_newline, country_field))}