I’ve set up a marketing base and part of what I’m using it for is creating UTM parameters. There are a few fields that are inputted via form, like campaign name and start date. Each of those has a secondary field in the base where the data from the first is made lowercase, special characters and spaces are removed, etc. Then those reformatted fields are all concatenated together into one field called ‘Calculated UTMs’. As is standard with UTMs, several of those different sections are separated by underscores.
I’ve set up an automated email to send these generated UTMs to someone on our GA team, and I’m pulling in the ‘Calculated UTMs’ field, but it’s displaying the final UTMs incorrectly - instead of showing with the underscores, it’s removing them and using them as indicators of where to make the text italicized. The field is also shown in an interface, and the underscores are correct there.
I’ve tried using asterisks and backslashes around that field name in my automation, but it’s not fixing the issue. Is there some other way that I can accomplish this? If there’s a way to send this email as plain text, that’d solve my problem.
Prevent underscores from converting to italics in the middle of concatenated field
+4Best answer by CaitlenBerg
For anyone looking at this in the future, what worked for me was adding three tics before and after the data that’s being pulled in. (The tics are on the top left of my keyboard, under the ~ symbol):
A couple of the other possible fixes from this list didn’t work for me, but here’s the Airtable reference on Markdown:
https://support.airtable.com/docs/using-markdown-in-airtable
+31Try escaping them with a \? e.g. this is my text:
And this is what the email looks like:
And the formula is:
SUBSTITUTE(
Name,
'_',
'\\_'
)
+4The problem seems to be that I can either have this formatted for the Interface or for Email. When I add backslashes or asterisks, they show up in the interface
+28Hey
Would you mind sharing an example screenshot showing the actual issue, as well as a screenshot of the automation where you are mapping the field?
I would highly suggest you use the following structure:
[Text]({Calculated UTMs}).
What might be happening (didn’t test it on my side) is that the markdown/html on the email automation could be setting such formatting. By using [Text]({Calculated UTMs}) you would get a hyperlink which is also neater.
Let me know if that works for you. Feel free to grab a slot if you’d like us to go through it together.
Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation
+31The problem seems to be that I can either have this formatted for the Interface or for Email. When I add backslashes or asterisks, they show up in the interface
Clunky, but what if you had one field for the email text and one field for the Interface display?
+1To fix this, try sending the email in plain text format instead of rich text or HTML. Most automation tools have an option to switch email content type — enabling plain text will preserve your underscores exactly as typed. If your tool doesn’t support plain text emails directly, you could try placing the UTM inside a code block (using backticks: `utm_here`) if markdown is supported.
+4For anyone looking at this in the future, what worked for me was adding three tics before and after the data that’s being pulled in. (The tics are on the top left of my keyboard, under the ~ symbol):
A couple of the other possible fixes from this list didn’t work for me, but here’s the Airtable reference on Markdown:
https://support.airtable.com/docs/using-markdown-in-airtable
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