Lines.FromBinary

Lines

Splits binary content into a list of text lines.

Syntax

Lines.FromBinary(binary as binary, optional quoteStyle as nullable number, optional includeLineSeparators as nullable logical, optional encoding as nullable number) as list

Parameters

Name	Type	Required	Description
`binary`	`binary`	Yes	The binary content to split into lines.
`quoteStyle`	`number`	No	How quoted line breaks are handled: QuoteStyle.None (default) or QuoteStyle.Csv.
`includeLineSeparators`	`logical`	No	When true, line separator characters are included at the end of each line.
`encoding`	`number`	No	The text encoding (e.g., TextEncoding.Utf8).

Return Value

list — A list of text values, one per line.

Remarks

Lines.FromBinary converts binary content into a list of text lines by splitting on line-break characters (CR, LF, or CRLF). This is useful for reading text files line-by-line without using Csv.Document.

When quoteStyle is set to QuoteStyle.Csv, line breaks inside quoted fields are not treated as line separators — this is important when processing CSV files that contain multi-line cell values.

A common pattern is to combine this with File.Contents to read a plain text or log file:

``powerquery Lines.FromBinary(File.Contents("C:\Logs\app.log"))``

Examples

Example 1: Split binary text into lines

let
    Source = Binary.From("Line 1#(lf)Line 2#(lf)Line 3"),
    Lines = Lines.FromBinary(Source),
    AsTable = #table({"LineNumber", "Text"}, List.Transform({0..List.Count(Lines)-1}, each {_ + 1, Lines{_}}))
in
    AsTable

Result

	LineNumber	Text
1	1	Line 1
2	2	Line 2
3	3	Line 3

Compatibility

✓ Power BI Desktop✓ Power BI Service✓ Excel Desktop✓ Excel Online✓ Dataflows✓ Fabric Notebooks