Last week, I wrote about how to use Power Automate to add automation to everyday tasks like emails. One of the examples I gave was to notify myself when vacation requests arrive so I can approve them as quickly as possible. Emails like these frequently have links like “click here to view the request” that take you to the item needing attention. It sure would be nice if we could extract that link and do something useful with it, right?
Regular expressions are a great way to parse text like this to extract useful details. Unfortunately, Power Automate doesn’t seem to have native support for regular expressions, but there are connectors from a third-party provider Plumsail. I took it for a test run today, and it worked pretty well. So, let’s take a look at the steps.
In order to use the Plumsail connectors, you’ll need a Plumsail account & API key. You can register for an account here, and create an API key here. Keep your API key handy, and head over to Power Automate.
In my workflow, I added the Plumsail Regular Expression Match connector as a new action after my “When a new email arrives” trigger action. If it’s the first time using a Plumsail connector, it will prompt you for your API key and a connection name.
After you’ve specified your connection name & API key, the connector UI changes to what you’d expect for a regular expression: Pattern & Text. The output of this control is a collection of matches, and the dynamic content will adjust based on the capture groups (parentheses) specified in your pattern.
In the screenshot above, my regular expression will search the email body for the “please click here” hyperlink and capture the URL. I can then dump this URL into the message to myself in Slack. Works great!
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