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Power Platform Community / Forums / Power Automate / How to get data from a...
Power Automate
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How to get data from an email body when body is all text

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I have a request to take the email approvals we get from our time off request system and automate it to Outlook and Teams calendars.

 

The body of the emaill comes in like so:

 

Your time off request has been approved.
09/06/2022 - 8 Hours - St.Louis Vacation Time Off - Position: - Reason: - Comment:
09/07/2022 - 8 Hours - St.Louis Vacation Time Off - Position: - Reason: - Comment:
09/08/2022 - 8 Hours - St.Louis Vacation Time Off - Position: - Reason: - Comment:
09/09/2022 - 8 Hours - St.Louis Vacation Time Off - Position: - Reason: - Comment:

 

Or it may look like this:

 

Your time off request has been approved.
09/06/2022 - 4 Hours - St.Louis Vacation Time Off - Position: - Reason: - Comment: AM
09/07/2022 - 4 Hours - St.Louis Vacation Time Off - Position: - Reason: - Comment: PM
09/08/2022 - 8 Hours - St.Louis Vacation Time Off - Position: - Reason: - Comment:
09/09/2022 - 8 Hours - St.Louis Vacation Time Off - Position: - Reason: - Comment:

 

There's some other text around these values, but they do not come labeled or tabled.  For this flow, I want the following values from this text:

- the dates at the beginning of each line of text

- the AM or PM value after the Comment: text

- and either the blank in the Comment or the 8 or 4 hours after the date (to set an all day flag or not)

 

I have established my flow to convert the body of the email from HTML to Text, and then set a couple of filter array to get it down to this data:

"09/06/2022 - 8 Hours - St.Louis Vacation Time Off - Position: - Reason: -",
  "Comment:",
  "09/07/2022 - 8 Hours - St.Louis Vacation Time Off - Position: - Reason: -",
  "Comment:",
  "09/08/2022 - 8 Hours - St.Louis Vacation Time Off - Position: - Reason: -",
  "Comment:",
  "09/09/2022 - 8 Hours - St.Louis Vacation Time Off - Position: - Reason: -",
  "Comment:"
 
Now I'm stuck.  I need to get those specific items out of the rows and stick them somewhere (variable, excel table, not sure) so that I can use them in the rest of the flow.  But nothing I'm trying to do to grab those pieces out of the text seems to get me where I want to go.
 
I'm fairly new to PA, but really good at Googling.  I've explored Parse JSON, but that doesn't seem to generate any usable schema.  I can't seem to use Find Text Position inside the filtered array.  I started down the path of an AI, but haven't read enough to see how to make one yet.
 
Any suggestions to get me restarted on the next (or different ways) to get this info out of the email?
 
Thanks!

 

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