Problem with REST Step in Flow Designer

[Randave Winston]

Hi. I have an action which has a REST Step that calls to a third-party API. The problem is that these characters %EF%BB%BF are appended to the URL.

For example:

https://ipinfo.io/8.8.8.8%EF%BB%BF/json

8.8.8.8 is an input. Because of the appended characters, this error appeared:

Invalid uri 'https://ipinfo.io/8.8.8.8/json': escaped absolute path not valid

Now, I've already managed to remove the characters from the URL but I need to know what is the cause of this because in other devices, this does not occur. Has anyone encountered this?

[Bob Binns]

Please fix this.  I'm new SNOW and my first project. REST posts are quite trivial to do in languages like Java or C#.  This had me spinning my wheels for 3 days and no matter what I did error 400.  

[Aoife]

It is an issue in the Browser itself, not in ServiceNow.  As has been mentioned several times, Chromium based browsers (Chrome and Edge for sure), have this issue.  Firefox does not, simply switch to Firefox.

REST works wonderfully in ServiceNow and has for years.  I have even used it, combined with staging tables and transforms, to do things approaching Mulesoft and other ETL products directly in ServiceNow.  

There have been many issues, over the years, introduced by various browsers.  I recall one time, many years back, that one of the browsers had an issue where it was auto-filling various fields on forms with information from built in form filling data that was meant for other fields.

Aoife

[LS7]

Known error issue = "Using Flow Designer in Chromium-based browsers causes unexpected behaviors" = https://support.servicenow.com/kb?id=kb_article_view&sysparm_article=KB1182247

If, instead, you end up with a "malformed URL" error, something is adding invisible spaces to one or more of the URL components. Both columns (Query Parameters name and Query Parameters value) may be sources of invisible characters.

• Backspace in each fields where there is info/data until you actually delete a character, then retype the deleted character. The invisible character should be deleted at this point.
• Save and Test

[Casper6060]

This was great info, thanks a lot for the help. This is still an issue today 10 August, 2023. I was reading this on multiple sites that invisible chars where the issue, but i did not see any spaces added after my values, like when you copy something from word and paste it, sometimes a space is added.

What actually is happening, is when you write your text and save, for some reason a the following is added on the end of the text "" https://www.codetable.net/hex/feff which is a "Zero Width No-Break Space" character. So i misunderstood what was being explained.

So for anyone also experiencing this, any field where you can enter text into it, put your cursor at the end and press backspace, if you press backspace and nothing seems to happen, you probably just deleted the hidden character, so as the post mentions to be on the safe side, press backspace until you actually delete a character, then add it again.