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

[Indigo744]

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:

PSWinReporting/Private/PSWinReportingEmails.ps1

Lines 62 to 64 in 36089a8

	Write-Color @WriteParameters -Text "[i] Preparing template ", "adding", " HTML ", "$($style.Name)", " tag for ", "$value", ' tags...' -Color White, Yellow, White, Yellow, White, Yellow -NoNewLine
	$Body = $Body.Replace($value, "<$($style.Name)>$value</$($style.Name)>")
	Write-Color -Text "Done" -Color "Green"

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 😸