HTTP BadRequest Error when JSON Body Contains Certain Symbols

[adamsharma]

Hi all,

I have a Flow which contains a HTTP GET request which obtains data from a MySQL database, returning a JSON body full of values that were originally input by end users. I noticed that the Flow had failed a couple of times and investigation revealed the cause was a user had included the "£" (British Pound) symbol within one of their responses. Removing this made the Flow work fine.

Further investigation shows this also happens with the "¬" (don't ask me what that's called!), but seemingly no others, at least from a standard UK keyboard.

The error message is for the pound symbol is "BadRequest. Http request failed as the content was not valid: 'Unable to translate bytes [A3] at index 550 from specified code page to Unicode" and for the "¬" symbol it is "BadRequest. Http request failed as the content was not valid: 'Unable to translate bytes [AC] at index 550 from specified code page to Unicode".

I've spent hours trying to fix but to no avail, any chance anyone can help? Not being able to deal with a major currency symbol seems like a fairly substantial drawback!

[v-bacao-msft]

Hi @adamsharma ,

Could you share a screenshot of the Flow configuration? In which action did this error occur?

From the current error message, it seems that these special symbols are not supported.

Best Regards,

[adamsharma]

Hi @v-bacao-msft,

Sure no problem, although to be honest after redaction of sensitive details there's not much left as it's a very simple configuration!

The URI points to an endpoint on a Business Process Management system that returns a JSON body.

[adamsharma]

Just to add, the exact same GET request in API Platform Postman returns perfectly fine, i.e:

(The example I've used in these screenshots is ü with an umlaut, but the error message is exactly the same when it's a £ or a ¬ or seemingly any character after Unicode U+007E on the Character Map)

[adamsharma · Accepted solution]

So basically it seems the HTTP action just can't handle various characters within the ISO-8859-1 character set. We changed this to utf-8 within the API endpoint and now all works fine.

Will be quite frustrating if people are building Flows that interact with APIs over which they have no control though - I was lucky our IT department could add an additional header in to specify utf-8 output but I don't believe there's any other solution.