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Running a Python script within Power Automate Desktop
How can you pass a value from Power Automate Desktop to a Python script, and then get the results back? This blog explains how.

Posted by Andy Brown on 28 March 2022

Running a Python script within Power Automate Desktop

This blog shows how to run a Python script to process a string of text held in a Power Automate Desktop (PAD) variable:

Our test variable holds a selection of 60s songs - we want to pick out the ones recorded by the Beatles.

Our Python script should pick out the ones by the Fab Four, and write these songs to a text file:

The final output of the program.

Passing values to a Python script

Adding a Python script task is easy enough in PAD:

The action to run a Python script.

Here's the start of the Python script:

You can surround the PAD variable with three double quotation marks. I've no idea if this is the only way to do this, but it certainly works!

This is what the result might look like:

The syntax looks a bit fussy - and is!

The Python Script

Here's my Python script to pick out the Beatles songs:

The script produces a Python list of Beatles songs stored in the variable BeatlesSongs.

Here's the code, should you wish to copy it:

# create a string variable containing a few lines

song_list = """%SongList%"""

# split this

songs = song_list.splitlines()

# create new list to pass back

beatles_songs = []

# build up list of words containing The Beatles

for num, song in enumerate(songs):

if "beatles" in song.lower():

beatles_songs.append(songs[num])

# return this to Power Automate Desktop

print(beatles_songs)

Translating the Python output to a data table

PAD doesn't recognise a Python list as a data table, so we need to do some work:

This may be a list to Python, but to PAD it's just a string of characters.

You could turn this into a PAD data table using this series of actions:

These actions remove any leading and trailing spaces, then extract the string of text starting at character number 3 (so omitting the leading [ and ' characters) and ending prematurely (hence omitting the ] and ' at the end). The Split text action then splits the text into separate lines.

Here are the parameters for the Get subtext action:

Use the Length property of the variable to find how many characters to extract.

And here are the parameters for the Split text action:

Create a new item wherever there's a comma (preceded by an apostrophe, and followed by a space and apostrophe).

Writing out the final songs

Finally, you can loop over the songs, writing each to a text file:

The details of each action aren't shown here, but the commands should be straightforward.

If anybody knows of a better way to do the things shown in this blog, please let me (and hence everyone reading it) know!

Some other pages relevant to the above blog include:

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