Articles on: Administration

Configure Flow: Text Parser

To be able to use values contained in a text as variables in the flow, you need the text parser.
With this, you can search directly for a so-called "key" and save the subsequent text of the same line as a variable.

The basic functioning is explained with the following text:

`Hello GroupAlarm,

I would like to trigger an alarm with the following parameters:
Event: TESTALARM
Alarm text: TEST Do not move out!
LONG##50.76382
LAT##6.0793028
Address: Goethestraße 5, 52064 Aachen, Germany #

All subscribers are to be alerted.`

Basically, the configured key is searched for within the text and removed from the found line, so that only the value behind it is stored. Therefore, if your key contains a :, it must be specified in the key.

Below are some examples applied to the above text that produce the following results:

Syntax	Result
Event:	TESTALARM
Event	: TESTALARM
LONG###	50.76382

With Expert Mode, regular expressions can be applied to the text.
This allows you to search even more specifically for values within a text. To do this, use at least one regex group that is to be matched, as the text parser can only ever extract the first group found.

If the parser does not match a group, your variable will not contain a value.

For example, the RegEx Address(.*)# can be used to extract the address "Goethestraße 5, 52064 Aachen, Germany" from the text above without a leading key and # at the end.

In addition to the actual regular expression, you can also configure RegEx flags for an advanced search. The following flags are currently available:

Flag	Name	Description
`i`	insensitive	ignores upper and lower case spelling
`m`	multi line	Treats the search context as multiple lines, i.e. `^` and `$` are the beginning and end of each line
`s`	single line	`.` also indicates a new line
`U`	ungreedy	the shortest possible string is used

Updated on: 28/02/2023

Was this article helpful?

Thank you!