Skip to main content

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

Learning Resources
All of our best learning resources can be found here.

Featured Articles Show & Tell Zapier's products AI Hub Zapier Tools Hub

Share your knowledge
Give back to the Community by sharing your automation wins and helping to answer questions.

Share your success See unanswered questions 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.

I am trying to use the Zapier formatter to format Markdown as HTML.  It properly makes the first bulleted list an unordered list using <li> tags, but then makes the rest of the lists into <em> which is an emphasis tag.  I do not see any spacing issues and I have validated the markdown in multiple tools and it is valid and renders correctly.

I can correct the issue by making sure that the first line before each list of bullets is a ###.  So for example, if I cut the “This breaks out like this per client:” out of the snip below, they will render as list items.  As I understand it, my markdown is valid either way.  

 

Markdown sample:

This is a  status report for Jul 28 – Aug 4, 2023.

###  Summary In the last week, we had 15 things.

* Marked as good: 14

* bad: 1

### Agent Summary As of today, we have 3 clients doing things

This breaks out like this per client:

* Client A: 19

* Client B: 25

* Client C: 97

 

Output:

<p>This is a  status report for Jul 28 – Aug 4, 2023</p>

<h3>Summary In the last week, we had 15 things.</h3>

<ul> <li>Marked as good: 14</li>

<li>bad: 1</li> </ul>

<h3>Agent Summary</h3>

This breaks out like this per client:

<em> Client A: 19

</em> Client B: 25

<em> Client C: 97

 

Hi @axlf 

Good question.

Another option to try is to Ask AI.

  1. OpenAI
  2. ChatGPT
  • I have asked the AI overlords.  They like my markdown syntax and are not aware of any issues.
  • I can setup a chatGTP / OpenAI integration and ask it to format it, and it will with some consistency problems.

I am just looking to understand how the Zapier function should work before I throw it away and start using laser weapons or my own javascript code blocks to handle it. I am guessing that there is some assumption on formatting in the Zapier function that I am missing.

Hi there @axlf! 👋

I just did some testing in a Zap and it looks like it’s a glitch that occurs for lines where no markdown formatting has been selected. For cases like the “This breaks out like this per client:” text that don’t have any markdown formatting applied you’d need to ensure that there’s a double newline break or double paragraph break at the end of it.

So between the “This breaks out like this per client:” and the first list item (“* Client A: 19”)  in order for them to be output correctly as a list items. If there’s only a singular line break/paragraph break then it will wrap the subsequent lines in <em> tags. But if the line were to have a markdown formatting (like ### for a heading) applied then the subsequent text would be correctly converted into list items.

To my mind, this appears to be a bug with the Convert Markdown to HTML Formatter transform. I checked internally but couldn’t find any reports of this behaviour so I’d recommend reaching out to our Support team about this. They’ll be able to open up a bug report for this on your behalf so it can be investigated further. 

Can you try adding a double newline/paragraph breaks where applicable to the text that’s given to the Formatter action to see if that fixes it in the meantime?

Reply


Terms & Conditions