Extracting Specific Text from an Email Body

(1) Share

Report

Posted on by BrianRoberts5

I am currently trying to retrieve anything that comes after 'Company Name: ' up until 'E-Mail Address'.

I have tried substring(body('Html_to_text'),add(lastIndexOf(body('Html_to_text'),'Company Name: '), 14),14)

But this ends up giving me 'E-' in the return, and every email trigger is going to have a different length company name.

Here is a sample example of an e-mail trigger the flow will recieve:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

See communication from Sana contact us form below:

Reason: Question
Product URL for sample request: Paste product URL here for sample requests

Name: Mike Lester O-Neal

Company name: Test 1025 2
E-mail address: Powerautomate@gmail.com
Phone number: 704194352

Street address: 123 Chicken Lane
City: Austin
State: Texas
Zip code: 00000

Business segment:

Current customer:

How did you hear about us:

Comments:
53463634

---------------------------------------------------

Categories:

Building flows

I have the same question (0)

All responses (10)

Answers (3)

Verified answer

trice602 16,053 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

Like (6)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Hi @BrianRoberts5 ,

Here's how I would solve this solution.

I use a few compose actions including indexof and substring, similar to what you are already doing. Let's review mine:

My first compose is:

add(indexOf(body('Html_to_text'),'Company Name:'),14)

What I am doing here is finding the starting position of "Company Name:" and adding 14 characters to that position with add() which adds two numbers together. This gives me the starting position of the dynamic company name.

My 2nd compose is:

indexOf(body('Html_to_text'), 'E-mail address:')

This gives me the starting position of the phrase "E-mail address:" With the two compose actions, I now have the starting and ending character positions to use substring in my last compose.

My 3rd compose is:

substring(body('Html_to_text'),outputs('Compose'),sub(outputs('Compose_2'),outputs('Compose')))

Here, I want the text between "Company name:" and "E-mail address:". I do that with substring(). The first parameter is easy, it's the starting position, so the output of the 1st compose. Easy enough. My last parameter is the length I want to capture and this is dynamic so I use a sub() to subtract the starting position of "E-mail address:" - the starting position of the "Company name:" (remember, plus 14 characters which is the length of the phrase and a space".

This will give you the company name and is dynamic at the starting and ending positions.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Verified answer

trice602 16,053 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

Like (2)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Hi @BrianRoberts5 ,

Here's the output from the compose actions so you can see the character positions and can help you see the values to associate with the final compose.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
BrianRoberts5 20 on at

Like (1)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

This worked flawlessly. Thank you for the breakdown at each compose as well - moving forward I now have a way better understanding of how to approach this rather than trying to do it all in one compose statement.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
trice602 16,053 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

Like (2)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Hi @BrianRoberts5 ,

Glad this helped! It's also the free route without a premium connector (although there are some good ones out there to consider too). This works well if you need to capture 10-15 fields in an email, granted it does create a lot of compose actions and can get messy but as you said, this does work well. 😀

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
BrianRoberts5 20 on at

Like (1)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Hello,
I've run into a problem with the extracted data. It appears to have an invisible '\n' behind it when looking up into business central, here is the flow for reference:

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
trice602 16,053 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

Like (1)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Hi @BrianRoberts5 ,

You can also add an additional 4th compose to replace that character.

replace(outputs('Compose_3'), decodeUriComponent('%0D%0A'), '')

If this one works too, please mark as a solution as well (it's an FAQ).

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Verified answer

trice602 16,053 Super User 2026 Season 1 on at

Like (1)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Hi @BrianRoberts5 ,

If I can recommend a better option though. It appears my original flow is grabbing an extra character which is that invisible newline return. Here's how to remove it completely:

add(indexOf(body('Html_to_text'), 'E-mail address:'), -1)

Here I adjust by compose 2 by one character:

With this, you may not need the 4th Compose because it is no longer going to capture that character position.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Safriguy 12 on at

Like (0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Hi @trice602,

I have a similar scenario to @BrianRoberts5 however I need to extract values for a number of items, not just Company Name as in this example. Is there an efficient way to do this? There could be anywhere from 6 to 15 items in an email I need to extract values for.

Cheers,

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
NTerrio 5 on at

Like (1)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Thank you soooooo much for posting this!!! Wish I had happened upon this months ago! ❤️

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
TomPeacock130 2 on at

Like (0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Hi,

I have used this, and sometimes it works well. But sometimes it breaks when the indexed text is on different lines as below:

Phone
number:

The index does not pick it up.

Is there anyway to fix this?

Thank you!

Was this reply helpful? Yes No