"washing" IncomingEmail.Message contents to make it readable

joben

I'm using the Incoming Email feature and want to clean the contents of the Message attribute so I can present it in an edit form.

For instance, if you send an email to the system, your email client will most likely include HTML and CSS.
This is how the Message attribute looks like:
Skärmbild 2021-04-08 095446.png

This is how the Message attribute looks like after using some regular expressions:

/*
1. Strip HTML tags. 
2. Remove weird CSS created by the email client. 
3. remove space if it appears at least 3 times in a row. 
4. remove newline if it appears at least 3 times in a row. 
5. Remove &nbsp; character that messes upp saving the form.
*/

REPLACE_PATTERN(REPLACE_PATTERN(REPLACE_PATTERN(REPLACE_PATTERN(REPLACE_PATTERN(InkommandeMail.Message,'\<[^\>]+\>',''),'.*;}',''),'\s{3}',''),'\n{3}',''),'&nbsp;','')

Skärmbild 2021-04-08 104530.png

This works fine with emails composed in Outlook, but it also feels a bit primitive.

Is there a smarter way to "wash" the Message field, or preferably, get the plain text version so it doesn't require processing?

BobK

...get the plain text version so it doesn't require processing?

I do not know of anyway within AwareIM to get just the text of an email without requiring some sort of processing.
There might be a setting on the email client to send emails as text only. But that would require you having control of how the emails are sent.

If you do not have control of sending the emails, IMO using regular expressions to clean up the message is the best way to go.

That being said, here are a couple of suggestions on you regular expressions, which you could ignore since your regular expressions are working.

'\s{3}' matches exactly 3 characters of whitespace.
If you really mean "remove space if it appears at least 3 times in a row."
use '\s{3,}' to match/delete 3 or more characters of whitespace.

As mentioned above, \s matches whitespace. \n is considered whitespace so the check for '\n{3}' is not needed.

Note: The above were tested on a Windows 10 system.

hpl123

I don´t use email internally in Aware (yet) but isn´t it possible to display the email in HTML instead i.e display the email the way it was (in most cases) designed. I GUESS you get the entire HTML of the email.

Jaymer

you can display the message without doing any processing.
using an HTML field will show the email.
... unless you actually need to strip it for processing of some sort.

joben

BobK wrote
...get the plain text version so it doesn't require processing?

I do not know of anyway within AwareIM to get just the text of an email without requiring some sort of processing.

Damn it. Guess I'm stuck with regex 🙂

BobK wrote
If you do not have control of sending the emails, IMO using regular expressions to clean up the message is the best way to go.

This option has been considered, and sadly I can't control this.

BobK wrote
That being said, here are a couple of suggestions on you regular expressions, which you could ignore since your regular expressions are working.

'\s{3}' matches exactly 3 characters of whitespace.
If you really mean "remove space if it appears at least 3 times in a row."
use '\s{3,}' to match/delete 3 or more characters of whitespace.

As mentioned above, \s matches whitespace. \n is considered whitespace so the check for '\n{3}' is not needed.

Thanks!
I am a newbie when it comes to regex, so don't be surprised if the code is pretty bad.

joben

hpl123 wrote
I don´t use email internally in Aware (yet) but isn´t it possible to display the email in HTML instead i.e display the email the way it was (in most cases) designed. I GUESS you get the entire HTML of the email.

Jaymer wrote
you can display the message without doing any processing.
using an HTML field will show the email.
... unless you actually need to strip it for processing of some sort.

HTML display works fine! AwareIM can even read and display the inline images inside the message.

However, in this scenario, we do need an editable field that is pre-populated by the plain text contents of the email message.
The regex solution has worked fine so far, so I will keep using it in lack of better options.

Thanks!

hpl123

joben wrote
hpl123 wrote
I don´t use email internally in Aware (yet) but isn´t it possible to display the email in HTML instead i.e display the email the way it was (in most cases) designed. I GUESS you get the entire HTML of the email.

Jaymer wrote
you can display the message without doing any processing.
using an HTML field will show the email.
... unless you actually need to strip it for processing of some sort.

HTML display works fine! AwareIM can even read and display the inline images inside the message.

However, in this scenario, we do need an editable field that is pre-populated by the plain text contents of the email message.
The regex solution has worked fine so far, so I will keep using it in lack of better options.

Thanks!

It is probably possible to code a Gmail clone or similar in Aware as well i.e where you see the HTML email and then respond in the same "dialog". Take a look at Ranfab (sample application) under "Contacts" and "Communication" for a cool way of using a timeline as a email thread kind of thing and something like that with a couple of plain text attributes for replies and you almost have a Gmail in Aware 😃.

joben

hpl123 wrote
It is probably possible to code a Gmail clone or similar in Aware as well i.e where you see the HTML email and then respond in the same "dialog". Take a look at Ranfab (sample application) under "Contacts" and "Communication" for a cool way of using a timeline as a email thread kind of thing and something like that with a couple of plain text attributes for replies and you almost have a Gmail in Aware 😃.

It is pretty neat, but in this scenario I mainly want to convert an incoming email to a work order, where the plaintext contents of the email just needs to be modified and structured slightly by a user. I don't need it for sending emails or messages back and forth.