About Zapier Community
New to our Community? Get to know more about our space and how to make the most of your time here.

Code of Conduct Community FAQ's Zapier Common Questions What to Expect

Get Started With Zapier
New to Zapier? We have got you covered with our Zapier 101 Resources.

Zapier Essentials

Get Support
Have a question? Let's get you an answer!

How Do I...? Troubleshooting Code & Webhooks Developer Zone

Other Help Resources
Wait, there's more! Check out these Community sourced spaces for additional resources.

Zapier Help Center Hire an Expert

Zapier Products
Learn more about Zapier's new products.

Zapier Tables Zapier Interfaces

Zapier Reading
All of our best learning resources can be found here.

Featured Articles Show & Tell AI Hub Zapier Tools Hub

Learning Groups
Excited to meet other builders? Check out our interest areas full of doers, dreamers, and in-betweeners.

User Groups

Other Learning Resources
Some of our favorite additional ways to upskill your Zapier knowledge.

Zapier Learn Zapier Blog Zapier Webinars

Product Updates
Check out what is new and upcoming with Zapier with our regular product updates.

Product Updates

Early Access Program
Want to join Early Access? Learn more here.

Best answer

What is the best way to convert Slack markup to HTML?

  • 23 May 2022
  • 7 replies
  • 1521 views
J
Userlevel 1

Searching over the forums and Google I’ve found more than a few threads of individuals converting Gmail contents and/or generic HTML for Slack markdown, but I haven’t been able to find anything about the opposite. 

For the most part there isn’t a problem with just taking the text (or raw text) of the Slack message and inserting it as the body of the Gmail action, with the exception of links. For example, a link formatted for Slack will come out as the following raw text. 

<https://www.example.com/|Example Link>

Does anyone have a clever solution for converting this into something more elegant for plaintext or HTML output? 

icon

Best answer by jaredwa 26 May 2022, 09:15

View original
This post has been closed for comments. Please create a new post if you need help or have a question about this topic.

7 replies

Troy Tessalone
Userlevel 7
Badge +14

Hi @jaredwa 

Good question.

You can try using the Formatter > Text > Markdown to HTML option: https://zapier.com/apps/formatter/help

⚡ Troy Tessalone - AutomationAce.com | Premier Certified Zapier Expert | #1 Zapier Community Contributor
J
Userlevel 1

Hi @jaredwa 

Good question.

You can try using the Formatter > Text > Markdown to HTML option: https://zapier.com/apps/formatter/help

Thank you for the reply. 

Unfortunately, because Slack markdown is (presumably) substantially different from what the Markdown to HTML option expects from markdown, this results in equally broken output. For example, a message like the following,

Example paragraph 1
Example paragraph 2, <https://www.example.com/|Example Link> goes here。

will unfortunately result in some mostly unusable HTML.

<p>Example paragraph 1</p>
<p>Example paragraph 2, <a href="https://www.example.com/|Example Link">https://www.example.com/|Example Link</a>goes here。</p>

While not a total waste of an action, I would have to go in with a script after to add line breaks and fix all of the links, and were it possible I was hoping for a more elegant solution. 

Danvers
Userlevel 7
Badge +12

Hi @jaredwa!

I found this info from Slack on how to remove formatting: 

  1. Detect all sub-strings matching <(.*?)>
  2. Within those sub-strings, format content starting with #C as a channel link
  3. Format content starting with @U or @W as a user mention
  4. Format content starting with !subteam as a user group mention
  5. Format content starting with ! according to the rules for special mentions
  6. For any other content within those sub-strings, format as a URL link
  7. Once the format has been determined, check for a pipe (|) - if present, use the text following the pipe as the label for the link or mention.

If you’re good with code, you might be able to whip up a bit of javascript that handles that, but I’m afraid that I don’t know how 🙈

J
Userlevel 1

Hi @jaredwa!

I found this info from Slack on how to remove formatting: 

  1. Detect all sub-strings matching <(.*?)>
  2. Within those sub-strings, format content starting with #C as a channel link
  3. Format content starting with @U or @W as a user mention
  4. Format content starting with !subteam as a user group mention
  5. Format content starting with ! according to the rules for special mentions
  6. For any other content within those sub-strings, format as a URL link
  7. Once the format has been determined, check for a pipe (|) - if present, use the text following the pipe as the label for the link or mention.

If you’re good with code, you might be able to whip up a bit of javascript that handles that, but I’m afraid that I don’t know how 🙈

Thank you for the idea. While not a Javascript whiz by any stretch of the imagination, I whipped up a short script to fix HTTPS links into standard markdown so that the Markdown to HTML option could be used. 

const { text } = inputData;
const regex = /<(https?:\/\/[\w-]+(?:\.[\w]+)+(?:\/[\w?=%&@$#_.+]+)*\/?)(?:\|((?:[^>])+))?>/g;
const result = text.replace(regex, (`[$2]($1)`));
output = [{ result }];

Thanks to everyone for helping sort this one out!

Danvers
Userlevel 7
Badge +12

Awesome, thanks so much for sharing your the script you used! 🙌🏻

B

Hi @jaredwa!

I found this info from Slack on how to remove formatting: 

  1. Detect all sub-strings matching <(.*?)>
  2. Within those sub-strings, format content starting with #C as a channel link
  3. Format content starting with @U or @W as a user mention
  4. Format content starting with !subteam as a user group mention
  5. Format content starting with ! according to the rules for special mentions
  6. For any other content within those sub-strings, format as a URL link
  7. Once the format has been determined, check for a pipe (|) - if present, use the text following the pipe as the label for the link or mention.

If you’re good with code, you might be able to whip up a bit of javascript that handles that, but I’m afraid that I don’t know how 🙈

Thank you for the idea. While not a Javascript whiz by any stretch of the imagination, I whipped up a short script to fix HTTPS links into standard markdown so that the Markdown to HTML option could be used. 

const { text } = inputData;
const regex = /<(https?:\/\/[\w-]+(?:\.[\w]+)+(?:\/[\w?=%&@$#_.+]+)*\/?)(?:\|((?:[^>])+))?>/g;
const result = text.replace(regex, (`[$2]($1)`));
output = [{ result }];

Thanks to everyone for helping sort this one out!

Any insight as to how to have it replace every URL it finds instead of only the first occurrence? 

J
Userlevel 1

Any insight as to how to have it replace every URL it finds instead of only the first occurrence? 

As written I haven’t had a problem at described; it’s replaced every URL.

However, I did have a few separate problems with links including unicode characters, mailto links, channels, @ mentions and whatnot. Here’s the updated script I’m using. The penultimate line is just adding linebreaks for readability. 

const { text } = inputData;
const slackAtFix = text.replace(/<((?:@|!)(?:.*?))>/g, (`$1`));
const slackChannelFix = slackAtFix.replace(/<#(?:.*?)\|(.*?)>/g, (`#$1`));
const linkFix = slackChannelFix.replace(/<(https?:\/\/[\w-]+(?:\.[\w]+)+(?:\/[^|]+)*\/?)(?:\|((?:[^>])+))?>/g, (`[$2]($1)`));
const mailtoFix = linkFix.replace(/<(mailto?:(?:[^|>])+)?(?:\|((?:[^>])+))?>/g, (`[$2]($1)`));
const result = mailtoFix.replace(/(?:\r\n|\r|\n)/g, '<br>');
output = [{ result }];

Unsure if this will help you or not, but cheers. 

Terms & Conditions