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Turn Gtalk Into A Command Line for the Web With Zapier

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Re: Turn Gtalk Into A Command Line for the Web With Zapier

#11

Post by gingerlime »

bryanh wrote: post #9
prakster wrote: post #8

Brian, whenever we bill the monthly subscription fee to our users for our saas app, we send them an email with their username and the amount. I get a copy of each such email in my gmail inbox. Is there a way I can use Zapier to parse the amounts into a google spreadsheet so I know the total amount billed for the day? (Currently I have to do this manually by opening each email and copying the username and amount inot…

Interesting use case! Unfortunately we don't have that clever of a parser. We've definitely talked about it but aren't 100% sold on any sort of internal implementation. We've thought about a "reverse template" where you would mark blocks of text as "variables" across a few examples and we'd parse it out. Not sure if that is feasible though... Any HN'ers done this before and have ideas or tips?

I think postmark and mandrill (and maybe others) do inbound email processing and then fire a webhook. Maybe hooking those together via zapier could provide a solution? I haven't actually used any inbound mail processing yet (or I'm ashamed to admit, zapier), but it sounds doable.

p.s. Hey Bryan!

Re: Turn Gtalk Into A Command Line for the Web With Zapier

#12

Post by asafira »

Dumb question: let's say I want to link gchat with twitter, and all the text after "tweet " I send to the zapier bot I want to be tweeted. Naively, I set things up (pretty easily, too!) to tweet ALL of the text I sent to the zapier bot. Is there an easy way to be able to tweet just parts of text? (maybe following a regexp, altho that's already getting too sophisticated for something so simple, especially since you guys just posted into turning gchat into a command line)

Re: Turn Gtalk Into A Command Line for the Web With Zapier

#13

Post by mikeknoop »

asafira wrote: post #12

Dumb question: let's say I want to link gchat with twitter, and all the text after "tweet " I send to the zapier bot I want to be tweeted. Naively, I set things up (pretty easily, too!) to tweet ALL of the text I sent to the zapier bot. Is there an easy way to be able to tweet just parts of text? (maybe following a regexp, altho that's already getting too sophisticated for something so simple, especially since you gu…

Yup there is. Check out our variable syntax: https://zapier.com/support/questions/119/passing-named-varia...

It's certainly much simpler than a regex but imposes more structure. We're always open to suggestions, so let me know if you've got any cool ideas on how we can parse smarter.

Re: Turn Gtalk Into A Command Line for the Web With Zapier

#14

Post by bryanh »

gingerlime wrote: post #11
bryanh wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting use case! Unfortunately we don't have that clever of a parser. We've definitely talked about it but aren't 100% sold on any sort of internal implementation. We've thought about a "reverse template" where you would mark blocks of text as "variables" across a few examples and we'd parse it out. Not sure if that is feasible though... Any HN'ers done this before and have ideas or tips?

I think postmark and mandrill (and maybe others) do inbound email processing and then fire a webhook. Maybe hooking those together via zapier could provide a solution? I haven't actually used any inbound mail processing yet (or I'm ashamed to admit, zapier), but it sounds doable. p.s. Hey Bryan!

We definitely support catching inbound email (https://zapier.com/zapbook/email/ and https://zapier.com/zapbook/mailgun/ comes to mind). I'm curious if there is a clever parsing solution...
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