Forum Discussion
convert HTML special characters
Is there an easy way to convert special characters encoded for html to standard characters. I'm receiving characters such as "<" that i want to convert to "<" or "é" that I want to convert to "é".
3 Replies
You'll find some links for html-cleanup here: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/afe68023-2d06-4270-ac4d-4416a60fdf49/i-have-a-column-in-directquery-that-is-stored-in-html-format?forum=powerquery
If you have a custom table of values to replace/translate, this might be better: https://blog.crossjoin.co.uk/2014/06/25/using-list-generate-to-make-multiple-replacements-of-words-in-text-in-power-query/
Thx for the reply Imke.
I found the links above but the first set is not really solving my issue because I don't really need to remove some html tags from a string, my concern is jut for special characters (and don't want to remove them, just to convert them).
I know Chris' pattern for this kind of replacement but just wanted to check if someone add a better solution than building a conversion table/function for this specific case. Sounds not, will use this trick but also post an idea for Microsoft to request for a native support of an Html.Decode function.
Hi Seddryck,
In my opinion, programming language is more suitable to deal with these scenario, you can write an api to convert these characters, then use power bi get the result data.
I agree with ImkeF's point of view, you can write a custom function to replace the specify of characters.
BTW, I haven't found any functions to format special HTML characters.
Regards,
Xiaoxin Sheng
