Escape sequences in Logic apps
If you are working with Logic apps in Azure you might have run into problems if you want to use an escape sequence - they are simply not supported. I had problems with this when I wanted to replace all line breaks in a string with spaces. This is annoying, but there is a workaround.
decodeUriComponent is used to decode percent encoded strings which is commonly used in query strings. It is less convenient, but it could be used as a replacement for escape sequences. In fact, you could use it to produce any string you want.
In my case I wanted to replace Windows line breaks in a string and I had this function:
replace('variables('myvariable')', '\r\n', ' ')Clearly this does not since escape sequences are not supported. So instead I wrote this:
replace('variables('myvariable')', decodeUriComponent('%0A%0D'), ' ')It worked just fine! Here is a small table of some common escape sequences:
| Characters | Escape sequence | Percent-encoded |
|---|---|---|
| Tab | \t | %09 |
| Linux line break | \n | %0D |
| Windows line break | \r\n | %0A%0D |
| Quote | \” | %22 |
| None-breaking space | N/A | %C2%A0 |
Strings that are used in query string are normally converted first to UTF-8 before they get percent-encoded, that is why characters above 127 are converted to two or more bytes.
If you are looking for other characters urlencoder.org might be useful.