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How to remove characters from the end of a string in Microsoft Power Automate Cloud Flows in 2 easy steps

Remove a certain number of characters from the end of a string value or variable inside a Microsoft Power Automate Cloud Flow

A quick and simple guide by Caspar Rubin that is easy to understand and follow.

1. Initial Situation

Let’s say we have a dynamic content string value where we want to remove the last three characters.
An example for this would be a date where we don’t want the days, only year and months.

Example “Compose” action

So basically turn this:

2022-09-06

in to:

2022-09

To do this, we need to remove -06 from the first string.

2. Expression

The Expression we use, to get rid of a certain amount of characters at the end of a string is the following:

substring(STRING,0,sub(length(STRING),3))

Let’s replace STRING in the above Expression with our dynamic content from the flow.

In our case, that’s the Compose – Date action.

substring(outputs('Compose'),0,sub(length(outputs('Compose')),3))

If you want to remove, let’s say, 5 characters instead of only 3, just change the number 3 at the end of the Expression to 5. Like this:

substring(outputs('Compose'),0,sub(length(outputs('Compose')),5))

The flow now looks like this:

Don’t forget to add the formula as an Expression!

3. Check

When we now run the flow, we get the following result:

How to remove characters from the end of a string in Microsoft Power Automate Cloud Flows in 2 easy steps

As you can see, the sign and the days have been removed from the string value.


A quick and simple guide by Caspar Rubin that is easy to understand and follow on how to remove characters from the end of a string in Microsoft Power Automate Cloud Flows in 2 easy steps or how to remove a certain number of characters from the end of a string value or variable inside a Microsoft Power Automate Cloud Flow.