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BusinessAnalyst's avatar
BusinessAnalyst
Icon for Helper I rankHelper I
9 years ago
Solved

Can't remove invisible characters

Hi everyone,   I received those data from SQL server. They look normal in SQL but when importing to Power BI, some of them contain invisible characters that I can't remove them. I have tried to tri...
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  • MarcelBeug's avatar
    MarcelBeug
    9 years ago

    Based on an export from your report data and some investigation, I noticed that your text contains characters:

    8236 - large, ocean-going vessel

    8237 - left to right override

     

    When removing those, you're fine to proceed. Code from the formula bar, with data in Column1 resulting in an additional column with numeric data:

     

    = Table.AddColumn(#"Changed Type", "NumericData", each Number.From(Text.Trim([Column1],{Character.FromNumber(8236),Character.FromNumber(8237)})),Int64.Type)
  • MarcelBeug's avatar
    MarcelBeug
    9 years ago

    To my limited DAX knowledge it is not possible in DAX.

    The SUBSTITUE function is close, but there is no function in DAX to convert unicodes to characters and I didn't succeed in copy/paste the special characters into the SUBSTITUTE function.

    Again, my DAX knowledge is limited.

Aaron_Borns's avatar
Aaron_Borns
Frequent Visitor
9 years ago

When "Applying Query Changes" to a DirectQuery, I am experiencing something related to this: an error that says Failed to generate XMLA request. The changes cannot be submitted to the server. Error returned : '", hexadecimal value 0x1F, is an invalid character.'.

 

The 0x1F character is also known as US or Unit Separator. I could not find any US chars when pasting the M-code or datatable into Notepad++. What should I do?

 

 

  • MarcelBeug's avatar
    MarcelBeug
    Icon for Community Champion rankCommunity Champion
    9 years ago

    It would be better to raise a new topic.

     

    Anyhow: it looks to me the issue is with the addtional 0: 0x01F instead of 0x1F.