Special characters in column not appearing properly in Power Query editor - how to fix?

[hobosapien]

Below is a snapshot of the issue I am having in PBI. Some of the characters are not appearing correctly within a column of data and I'd like them to. Most of them are letters like é or ö but come up as question marks in the PQ editor. How can I get them to display properly?

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply from @vicky_ , please allow me to provide another insight:

Hi @hobosapien ,

You can try below power query code to fix this problem:

let
    Source = Table.FromRows(Json.Document(Binary.Decompress(Binary.FromText("i45WCn6/f29SYnFJZmqeUqwOCl+hOCUNLBYAFMvNBhJAJbEA", BinaryEncoding.Base64), Compression.Deflate)), 
    let _t = ((type nullable text) meta [Serialized.Text = true]) in type table [ColumnName = _t]),
    ReplaceCharacters = (text as text) as text =>
    let
        replacedText = Text.Replace(text, "S�bastien", "Sébastien"),
        replacedText2 = Text.Replace(replacedText, "P�mk�n", "Pömkin")
    in
        replacedText2,
    AppliedReplacements = Table.TransformColumns(Source, {{"ColumnName", each ReplaceCharacters(_)}})
in
    AppliedReplacements

Best Regards,
Adamk Kong

If this post helps, then please consider Accept it as the solution to help the other members find it more quickly.

[vicky_ · Accepted solution]

Check the text encoding type when you're importing your data. See https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powerquery-m/textencoding-type

For example, I have a data from a csv doccument, and I have a step called "import csv" where i can specify what type of encoding is used.