Identify and extract email addresses from a document using Power Automate

September 21st 2023

Post #3 of our Build Flows Faster series covers our new Utility actions for Power Automate. We will publish more posts and accompanying videos over the coming weeks, but today’s post is about extracting email addresses from text with Power Automate.

Our utility actions are targeted at helping you build flows more quickly with less complexity, and they brilliantly only use 0.05 actions from your Encodian subscription allowance. For example, under a standard plan that permits 500 actions per month (uses), you could use the utility actions 10,000 times!

Introducing the ‘Extract Email Addresses from Text’ Utility Action

The ‘Extract Email Addresses from Text‘ utility action identifies and returns an array of all email addresses found within the text value provided to the action.

Video Guide: Extract Email Addresses from Text in Power Automate

Instructions: Extract Email Addresses from Text in Power Automate

Consider the following scenario: I have a SharePoint document library where PDF renditions of a customer satisfaction survey are saved. I need to identify any email addresses contained within the document added and then add the email addresses to a SharePoint column named ‘Email Addresses

The following steps will add this capability to the existing flow depicted above:

1. Add the Encodian ‘Get PDF Text Layer‘ action underneath the SharePoint ‘Get file content‘ action

1.a. Filename: Select the ‘File name with extension‘ property provided by the SharePoint ‘When a file is created (properties only)‘ trigger action

1.b. File Content: Select the ‘File Content‘ property provided by the SharePoint ‘Get file content‘ action

The Encodian ‘Get PDF Text Layer‘ will extract all the text contained within the PDF document provided, returning as a string (text) value.

2. Add the Encodian ‘Utility – Extract Email Addresses from Text‘ action beneath the Encodian ‘Get PDF Text Layer‘ action

2.a. Text: Select the ‘Text Layer‘ property provided by the Encodian ‘Get PDF Text Layer‘ action

The Encodian ‘Utility – Extract Email Addresses from Text‘ action will return an array of email addresses contained within the ‘Result‘ property, and given we need to update the SharePoint column with a single text value we need to do some extra processing to concatenate each email address in the array to a single text value! use the Encodian ‘Utility – Concatenate Text‘ action for this purpose!

3. Add the Encodian ‘Utility – Concatenate Text action beneath the Encodian ‘Utility – Extract Email Addresses from Text‘ action

3.a. Click the ‘Switch to input to entire array‘ button

3.b. Text Values: Select the ‘Result‘ property provided by the Encodian ‘Utility – Extract Email Addresses from Text‘ action

3.d. Delimiter: Enter ‘, ‘

4. Update the SharePoint ‘Update file properties‘ action

4.a. Email Addresses: Select the ‘Result‘ property provided by the Encodian Utility – Concatenate Text action

The flow will execute every time a new document is added to the SharePoint library:

And the contained email addresses will be added to the ‘Email Addresses‘ SharePoint column:

If you require further advice or support regarding Encodian utility actions, please email our support team at support@encodian.com. As always, the team would be delighted to help.

UPDATE: We’re excited to announce some significant updates to Flowr for Power Automate! As of October 2024, we’ve improved by updating action names and splitting Flowr’s central Power Automate connector into nine specialized connectors. These changes will make your workflow faster, smoother, and more efficient. The new action names are more precise and intuitive, saving you time, while the focused connectors enhance performance and flexibility. This update also helps future-proof the platform for even more powerful features. Check out our updated action names blog.

Author
Jay Goodison

Managing Director

You might also be interested in...