Carriage Return (aka New Line or Line Break) being ignored in Report Table Tool

[mbarone]

I know this has been posted before, but the posts are fairly old, and I have just confirmed with Support that it is still an issue.  Seems to be a pretty basic request, so I'm putting it out there again under this new heading.

The issue is that if you have data in a field, and you have that data separated by a new line (\n), it will show up fine in a browse tool, or pretty much any other output (database file, Office Document file, etc.). But if you try to use the Table Tool under Reporting, it ignores the line break and strings the data together.

Example:

The field data looks like this in a browse or most other outputs:

Hello, my name is 

Michael Barone

and I love

Alteryx

But when I try to pull this field into a Table Tool, it shows up like this:
Hello, my name is Michael Barone and I love Alteyrx

Putting this out here again in hopes that it gets lots and lots of stars so it gets put on the road map!!

[apolly]

Kelvinlaw, thanks for letting me know how you are using the tool. We will keep these in mind when we make updates to the Table tool. Alex Polly

[rahuls]

HI @mbarone,

Just checking if you were able to find some solution to this. I am also facing this and its highly frustrating. 

[mbarone]

Nothing yet @rahuls.

Has there been any movement on this @apolly?  

[apolly]

Hi Michael and others, Apologies, we have not been able to schedule this work yet. It would be an enhancement to the two tools since it never worked in previous versions of Alteryx. When investigating, the issue is not a simple fix and we have refreshes of the Report Text and Report Table tools intended. So we've had trouble prioritizing this work when we plan to refresh the tools anyway. That said, I have not forgotten you and do want to get this fixed. I understand how frustrating to have the cell reformat the contents when brought into Designer. Please message me with questions/frustrations and I will update you when we are able to get this fixed. Again, sorry that this will not be addressed immediately. Alex Polly

[mbarone]

Thanks for the update Alex!  I'll just sit tight for now then.  I'll keep my eye on the release notes for future releases.

[CalDowd98]

Hi Im using the report text tool to render some data onto a pdf. I have carriage returns in the data, but they just show as a space on the report text. Is there a way of getting the chunk of text to appear on new lines ? I noticed this is noted as one of the known errors - would it be a similar issue to this ? DE19058 Use of a carriage return in a Chart Title within an Insight tool causes an error. Remove the carriage return to resolve the issue. Thank you !

[JFR]

Hi, do you have any workarounds in the meantime?

[mbarone]

No workarounds.

@apolly - any movement on this one?  More and more users are finding it as a point point.

Thanks.

[JFR]

Just found a workarounds that works for me.  Since I send email in French with accent, I have to modify the final layout through a formulas: ConvertFromCodePage([Layout], 65001)

I then do a regex_replace to search for a specific string (I used <br> in my text that was converted to "&lt;br&gt;" so I just look for this string and replace it with the HTML tag <br/> and it works.

REGEX_Replace([Text], "&lt;br&gt;", "<br/>")

[apolly]

@JFR , thank you for sharing that workaround, though I recognize it is exactly that, a patch fix. I appreciate you sharing it all the same since it is all users have at this point, but I will work to make a better user experience for this. @mbarone, thank you for raising this again. To anyone following this thread, I hear you. Thank you for adding 'stars' to this thread to show it's importance. I want to help with this frustration and will work to get it moved forward. I cannot promise a timeline until we formally commit to it as a development team, but I want to fix this.