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How do I converting work Item description from Azure DevOps into plaintext?

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

I have a flow that lists all work items in azure devops into a tabular form which then sends the table as an email, in HTML. Unfortunately, the description field refuses to convert into plaintext. As far as I am aware, this is because the text editor for the description field in Azure Devops is not written in markdown. Here is my flow:

Which then sends the following message (I'm testing it being sent to myself):

But the email as you can see still has the CSS information lingering on the descriptions of each work item.

In Azure DevOps I have also removed all formatting from each work item (individually!). So is there a formula I can use that converts the description field to plaintext? Also I have tried the Convert HTML to Plaintext action and this does not work as it would not return a table with each consecutive description (per work item) converted in plaintext.

Please help!

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manuelstgomes 6,631 on at

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Hi @Anonymous

DevOps stores the description file in rich text. The full reference can be found here.

In this case, the rich text is storing the values encoded (for example < instead of <), so when you set them up in the email decodes and shows <div>, for example.

I don't think there's a function here that will help you with that. I can only see two solutions:

Create an Azure function that converts that for you

Find a web service that you can pass the string, and it returns the decoded string.

If someone else here knows another solution I would also like to learn how to do it.

If I have answered your question, please mark your post as Solved.
If you like my response, please give it a Thumbs Up.

Cheers
Manuel

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Nathaniel Alcantara 2 on at

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I'm still looking for the answer to this issue.

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thenecroscope1 48 on at

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I'm having the exact same issue now 😞

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thenecroscope1 48 on at

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I was thinking this was going to take ages to resolve by using lots string manipulation methods. I just stumbled on this which seems to work for me at the minute, I need to do some more real test, but I will post here just in case I forget to post later on 🙂
"HTML TO TEXT" even though its markdown

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