About Zapier Community
New to our Community? Get to know more about our space and how to make the most of your time here.

Code of Conduct Community FAQ's Zapier Common Questions What to Expect

Get Started With Zapier
New to Zapier? We have got you covered with our Zapier 101 Resources.

Zapier Essentials

Get Support
Have a question? Let's get you an answer!

How Do I...? Troubleshooting Code & Webhooks Developer Zone

Other Help Resources
Wait, there's more! Check out these Community sourced spaces for additional resources.

Zapier Help Center Hire an Expert

Zapier Products
Learn more about Zapier's new products.

Zapier Tables Zapier Interfaces

Zapier Reading
All of our best learning resources can be found here.

Featured Articles Show & Tell AI Hub Zapier Tools Hub

Learning Groups
Excited to meet other builders? Check out our interest areas full of doers, dreamers, and in-betweeners.

User Groups

Other Learning Resources
Some of our favorite additional ways to upskill your Zapier knowledge.

Zapier Learn Zapier Blog Zapier Webinars

Product Updates
Check out what is new and upcoming with Zapier with our regular product updates.

Product Updates

Early Access Program
Want to join Early Access? Learn more here.

  • Home
  • Get Help
  • Troubleshooting
  • Smartsheet error: The app returned "The characters < and > are not supported. Please remove them and try again.".
Question

Smartsheet error: The app returned "The characters < and > are not supported. Please remove them and try again.".

  • 22 May 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 47 views
WALEED

This post has been edited by a moderator to remove personal information. Please remember that this is a public forum and to remove any sensitive information prior to posting.

Hi
Im connecting SmartSheet to Zoho invoice , System reject taking data from  Smartsheet and does not create invoice in Zoho  Books

It keep give me error message :
The app returned "The characters < and > are not supported. Please remove them and try again.".

Strange that The Zap accept some rows and reject other rows that are not different to accepted ones , i compared them and nothing significant

I also  removed most changed suspicious text on all cells in attempt to find where are my not accepted characters with no success

I included sheet link , check rows at the bottoms  
xxxxxxxxxx


Sample Zap ID not triggered :  006b63ae-ce1f-a5ef-b638-30c6d5202b41

 

 

1 reply

SamB
Rank
Userlevel 7
Badge +11

Hi @WALEED, thanks for joining us here in the Community! 🙂

Hmm, that error seems to specifically have an issue with the angled brackets (“<” and “>”) that were present. Am I right in thinking that the error is occurring when the Zoho Books action is attempting to create the invoice? 

If so, I suspect that there must be angled brackets located within one of the fields that’s been selected from SmartSheet on the Create Invoice (Zoho Books) action. In which case there’s a couple options I’m thinking you could try to get rid of the error:

  1. Remove all instances of those angled brackets.
    Use the find and replace function in SmartSheet to find and remove all instances of < and >
    Then you’d need to make sure that they are not added in future. Although this may not be the easiest option if the information in the rows are automatically added from another app so option #2 might be your best bet here.
  2. Use a Formatter to remove any angled brackets
    If it’s not possible to easily prevent those angled brackets from being added then you could use a couple of Formatter (Text > Replace) actions to remove any instances of < and > that are present. For the Input field on the Formatter actions you’d want to select the field from SmartSheet that would typically contain the angled brackets. You can find out more about using Formatter’s “Replace” transform option here: Using Replace


Both options here should help to ensure that Zoho Books doesn’t have any angled brackets supplied in the information that’s used for creating the invoice.

If I’ve misunderstood the issue here at all please can you share some further details or screenshots to better illustrate the issue. But please remember to remove/hide any private information like names, emails, phone numbers etc. from any screenshots first before sharing them here in the Community.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Reply


Terms & Conditions