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Hi all,

I have a bit of a complex one, well I think so but hopefully someone might be able to help. 

 

I am looking into something like Parsio or other parsing software to achieve this but I have also been considering just straight up using Gmail as the trigger to save $ and complexity. I am also open to either Google Sheets, Airtable or other for my database.

I want to accomplish the following (reference in attached scree)

  • Forward a travel booking email to an inbox of my choice
  • Get specific data fields out of that email and into my database
  • Send specific data fields to different sheets/tables that match the dataset ie send Flight details fields to the “Flights” sheet/table and send the Passengers details fields to the “Passengers” sheet/database

I would love some help on how I could possibly achieve this.

Thanks

Chris

 

Assuming the emails are always identical in format, this is absolutely possible and not even that complex, actually. With a bit of simple JavaScript (the .split()(] method will be your best friend here), you could do this without using a parsing app.

Trigger: New Email Matching Search

Action: Code by Zapier w/ JavaScript parsing

Action: Create new record in Airtable

Action: Create new record in Airtable (could also link passenger to a particular flight at this point using the ID provided by the output in the previous step.

Let me know if you need a sample of the JavaScript you’ll want to use :)


Thank you for your reply. I would love an idea of what the JS to use would be?

They will have different formats from time to time as they may come from different airlines which is a pain in the a$$ but this might give me a good starting point and only allow a certain template to be used from email.

Thanks

Chris

 


Hey there @chrisjack !

 

Todd is 100% correct -- the hard part of this is keeping up with the different formats of the emails being sent.  Directly to your question, the JS would vary for each different permutation based on the HTML and other elements in each version of the email.  The code itself would be built by inspecting the email and then writing the code from there.

Another possibility exists with https://parser.zapier.com, but you again would be mainly limited by the different versions of each email.  The real pain point you will find in the long run is when services don’t send an email they should (or there is deliverability issues) or when they eventually change the HTML structure of their notification emails.  You would need to modify whatever solution per change, as well as be pretty vigilant for noticing the changes when they happen to get in-front of any missing data issues.

Past the parsing issue, should you be able to overcome them, Zapier sending data to to the other services you mentioned is quite straightforward and I doubt it would pose any difficulty.


Hi @chrisjack, how’s it going?

I’d love to know if you were able to build what you needed with @Todd Harper and @RALaBarge’s suggestions - how did you get on?