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Retrieve email messages - isolate a part of a date string

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Posted on by Community Power Pla... Microsoft Employee

I've created an MS Form that's basically a questionnaire. Our company collects these from our employees and catalogues them for historical purposes. Basically, I need to retrieve these emailed Forms responses per person, per month.

Example:

John Deer's responses.10-29-2021.PDF

Any idea how to isolate the month value of the date string? I can determine the person it belongs to by email address.

Desired result:

~~John Deer's responses.~~10~~-29-2021.PDF~~

In effect I just need to trim out all the data but the date value. I've done some string manipulation in the past but that's only with VBA.

Guidance is appreciated.

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Power Automate Desktop

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VJR 7,635 on at

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Hi @Anonymous

Here is how the entire flow looks like

The first Display Message on Line No 2 will get the date part from the text

The last Display Message will give the name of the month.
If you want the full month name then use MMMM in the formatting.

Copy and paste the below code into a new PAD flow and you can make modifications for yourself.

Text.SplitWithDelimiter Text: $'''John Deer\'s responses.10-29-2021.PDF''' CustomDelimiter: $'''.''' IsRegEx: False Result=> TextList Display.ShowMessage Message: TextList[1] Icon: Display.Icon.None Buttons: Display.Buttons.OK DefaultButton: Display.DefaultButton.Button1 IsTopMost: False ButtonPressed=> ButtonPressed Text.ToDateTimeCustomFormat Text: TextList[1] CustomFormat: $'''MM-dd-yyyy''' DateTime=> TextAsDateTime Display.ShowMessage Message: TextAsDateTime Icon: Display.Icon.None Buttons: Display.Buttons.OK DefaultButton: Display.DefaultButton.Button1 IsTopMost: False ButtonPressed=> ButtonPressed Text.FromCustomDateTime DateTime: TextAsDateTime CustomFormat: $'''MMM''' Result=> FormattedDateTime Display.ShowMessage Message: FormattedDateTime Icon: Display.Icon.None Buttons: Display.Buttons.OK DefaultButton: Display.DefaultButton.Button1 IsTopMost: False ButtonPressed=> ButtonPressed
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Agnius Bartninkas Most Valuable Professional on at

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Use the Parse Text action with some Regular Expressions (RegEx).
Here's a sample code from PAD on how to get what you want, assuming the text is stored in %Text% (you can paste this directly into your PAD):
Text.ParseText.RegexParseForFirstOccurrence Text: Text TextToFind: $'''\\d{2}(?=-\\d{2}-)''' StartingPosition: 0 IgnoreCase: False OccurrencePosition=> Position Match=> Match
You will then end up with the value you want in %Match%:

The idea behind the RegEx above is as follows:
\d - this indicates a digit
{n} - this indicates the quantity of the item before this, meaning that \d{2} indicates 2 digits. You can also use \d\d instead, if you prefer.
(?={something}) is a so-called "positive lookahead". It basically is a part of the pattern that must follow whatever you're looking for, but is not included in the result. So, (?=-\d{2}-) means that your pattern must be followed by a dash (-), two digits and another dash.

So basically, the entire pattern \d{2}(?=-\d{2}-) will retrieve any two digits that are followed by a dash, two more digits and another dash.
In all cases of a date in the format of DD-MM-YYYY, you will get the DD part of it.
Also, it will completely ignore everything before the two digits.

If you find this helpful, please mark it as the preferred solution.
If you have any further questions to how this works, let me know.

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