Difference between "Apply Regular Expression" and "Find all matches to Regex" in pipeline text stage

Question

I am trying to parse an email into different fields. The email is reasonably consistently structured and it seems that I ought to be able to use regular expressions to pull out the values I need but I'm having trouble.

I first tried the text action "find all matches to regex" and in looking at the log I could see the different "groups" (ie the matches) getting parsed correctly but when I used them in the field for a create record action, nothing appeared. When I used "Apply Regular Expression" with the same regular expression string that I used before, I saw an "input" object in the activity log but no "output" object. ie, no "group_1", "group_2" etc with the matches.

Has anyone used these text pipeline actions for regex and can give me some pointers? thanks for any guidance.

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Andrew Patricio
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robhenderson · Answer

Hello Andrew,You are definitely on the right path, as using regex is exactly how I would recommend doing that. If the output is not showing in the activity it is because it's not finding a match. This is just a guess but one thing that's easy to overlook is the formatting of the email. What the regex actually looks at is the code behind the email, so that includes formatting things like html tags and whatnot.&nbsp;

I would double check the output of your trigger step to see exactly what the regex needs to be compared against and see if that requires any change in your regex formula.

If this isn't what's going on or you would like a hand at this, please open a support case with your CSR ID# and Pipeline ID and link to this article, the agent will escalate it up to me and I'll be happy to take a look into it for you.

Hope that helps,

andrewpatricio1 · Answer

Hi Rob,The odd thing is that when I use the same regex in the "find all matches" action, it parses correctly and I can see the "group_1", "group_2" etc variables filled in the activity log but when I use them via "{{b.group_1}}" etc to set the value of a quickbase field I get nothing.&nbsp; &nbsp;When I use the same regex against the same email text in the "Apply Regular Expression" action, I get no output object at all.I will put in a support ticket for this.&nbsp; &nbsp;thanks!------------------------------Andrew Patricio------------------------------

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Difference between "Apply Regular Expression" and "Find all matches to Regex" in pipeline text stage