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Help with data extraction from consistent msg body?

  • November 12, 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 97 views
A
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Hello!

I am trying to find a formula that will extract a customers name and address from a body of text and create new single line text fields with this data. The data is coming into airtable via an email automation, and the body of the text data coming in is always consistent in format, with four pieces of data that change, the name, address, market, and URL for the customer. There are other keywords within the body that could be used to identify the before and after for the desired text - but the left, right, and mid formula’s will not work because each body will have varying lengths based on the customers info.

3 replies

ScottWorld
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  • ScottWorld
  • Genius
  • November 12, 2021

Welcome to the community, @Alex_Graham!

My guess is that if you wanted to parse these emails yourself, you would need to use REGEX to do so. The built-in REGEX functionality in Airtable is very limited, so you would likely need to write your own Javascript that includes full REGEX functionality.

However, it seems like there might be an easier way. I’ve never used this tool before, but it looks like MailParser.io offers an easy way to parse emails and then send that information onto other apps such as Airtable using Zapier or Integromat:

If you go down this path, I would highly recommend using Integromat over Zapier because Integromat is much easier & more powerful & significantly cheaper than Zapier.

It also looks like Integromat offers a native MailParser trigger:

A
kuovonne
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  • kuovonne
  • Brainy
  • November 13, 2021

Welcome to the Airtable community!

I agree with Scott that REGEX is the way to go. Since you only need to find a single occurrence of each piece of data per record, this can probably be done with Airtable REGEX formula functions. However, I recommend experimenting with an online REGEX tester first, and then making any adjustments to the formula to fit Airtable’s REGEX syntax.

ScottWorld
A
A
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  • Alex_Graham
  • Author
  • New Participant
  • November 15, 2021

Welcome to the community, @Alex_Graham!

My guess is that if you wanted to parse these emails yourself, you would need to use REGEX to do so. The built-in REGEX functionality in Airtable is very limited, so you would likely need to write your own Javascript that includes full REGEX functionality.

However, it seems like there might be an easier way. I’ve never used this tool before, but it looks like MailParser.io offers an easy way to parse emails and then send that information onto other apps such as Airtable using Zapier or Integromat:

If you go down this path, I would highly recommend using Integromat over Zapier because Integromat is much easier & more powerful & significantly cheaper than Zapier.

It also looks like Integromat offers a native MailParser trigger:


Thank you for this info!

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