Colors & Styles not working with accents and other non-ascii characters

Tested on the Legacy script (V1). I didn't test on the V2 version.

For a workaround, see below.

If a formatting value (be it for color or style) is using accent or other non-ascii characters, then the color or style won't be applied.

Since event log are localized, accented characters can appeared in the report (French in our case).

Given a formatting option below:

$FormattingParameters = @{
    Colors = @{
        Green = 'ajouté', 'activé' # 'added', 'activated'
    }
}

It does not highlight the word:

The issue is not linked to the file encoding, as UTF8-BOM is used and the accent is correctly encoded as we can see in the log:

The issue is related to the way the replace function is actually called: https://github.com/EvotecIT/PSWinReporting/blob/36089a85e19c8758102e4e3e9bc81737b1760238/Private/PSWinReportingEmails.ps1#L62-L64

We can see the Replace function is called on the Body variable which contains the HTML body.

Accents (and others non-ascii characters) are usually html-encoded to avoid rendering issue. We can quickly see this is indeed the case here when looking at the raw HTML output:

The solution would be to html-encode the color/style values before trying to replace them in the HTML body.

Workaround

For a simple workaround, simply drop these two lines before calling Start-ADReporting (assuming the formatting options are in the $FormattingParameters variable):

$FormattingParameters.Colors.clone().Keys | % { $FormattingParameters.Colors[$_] = $FormattingParameters.Colors[$_] | % { [System.Web.HttpUtility]::HtmlEncode([System.Web.HttpUtility]::HtmlDecode($_)) } }
$FormattingParameters.Styles.clone().Keys | % { $FormattingParameters.Styles[$_] = $FormattingParameters.Styles[$_] | % { [System.Web.HttpUtility]::HtmlEncode([System.Web.HttpUtility]::HtmlDecode($_)) } }

It simply iterates over all colors/styles values and html-encode them. (Note that I left the HtmlDecode in case somebody run these lines multiple time)

With that, the colors and styles are now working 😸

EvotecIT / PSWinReporting

Colors & Styles not working with accents and other non-ascii characters #80

Workaround