Unable to add special characters such as # and ( in headers of Report in Text format

Question

Hi,
I am working on developing a report that will be exported to tab delimited text format from SSRS. The Report has been developed and it is getting exported to tab delimited text format. However, special characters in the heading are getting trimmed. I would
like to get these special characters in the heading of text file. Any help in this regard will be appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi Abhijit,
Per my understanding that you have add an extension which export the report as .txt format, now the issue is the special characters"#" not display after exportted, right?
I have tested on my local environment and can reproduce the issue , this is by default, when you type some special characters "#" as the textbox name  in the properties window or as calculatted field name you will get error pop up window,
if you type the text in the textbox as "#" it will also not display in the CSV or tab delimited text format report.
But we have some alternative method to make them display some way, more details information below for your reference:
Display "#" in the table header
If we want to make them display in the table header, we need to create an new table an put all the table header as one record in the table, because the value in the table can display "#" correctly：
I assumed you have four columns as the table header(Test1#,Test2#,Test3#,Test4#) please create an new table (HeaderTable )to store these value:
Create two dataset2:
Dataset1: display the record from step1
DataSet2：display the record of the report
Create two Tablixs as below and both remove the header column, Tablix1(Dataset1) diplay the value comes from the step1 as the new header column:
 Tablix1(Dataset2):Report Data
In this way, when export to tab delimited txt, you will got the table header display correctly.
Display "#" in the textbox outisde of the tablix
If you just want to display "#" outside the tablix, you can just add an calculatted field(Test) and use expression like below to specify the value which you want to display in the calculatted field:
="test######test"
Then you can use below expression in the textbox:
=first(Fields!Test.Value, "DataSetName")
If you still have any problem, please feel free to ask.
Regards,
Vicky Liu
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Vicky Liu
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