Parsing Text in Podio with GlobiFlow

Posted: 2015-04-12

A word of warning - the following is quite technically complex and for advanced users with programming knowledge.

Custom Functions

GlobiFlow exposes a few powerful custom functions that allow flexible parsing of text data.

strip_tags_gf( $text )
=> returns text

This function works almost identically to PHP's built-in strip_tags, but also also retains carriage returns between paragraphs and list items, and also prefixes list items with " - ". This makes the return string more usable.

preg_match_gf( $regex_pattern, $text, $index )
=> returns match[$index]

This function works the same way as PHP's preg_match, but also allows you to specify the array index to return, so that you have a string result.

An Example

Let's say for example, you get new items created in a VoiceMail app via email, that contain details of messages received, like:

How do you get the From Phone Number out?

It would look something like this:

With similar regular expressions, you could get the caller ID value, the message length, or any piece of text from a larger text block.

Resources

For more information on Regular Expressions, see this Regex Tutorial.

A great interactive tool to help build expressions is this Regex Tester.

Caveats

Please note that regular expressions can be very complex and time-intensive to create. For this reason, we do not include regular expression help as part of free support.

However, seeing how powerful they can be, we decided to include this functionality in GlobiFlow because it can, and does, benefit many of our users.

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by Andreas Huttenrauch
Owner of Globi Web Solutions, and Podio Fanatic.

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