Can I pull a list of info out of an email?

Question

I get a daily email that lists upcoming appointments, and their length. The number of appointments vary from day to day.

The emails go like this:

================

Today's Schedule

9:30 AM

3h

Brazilian Blowout

[Client #1 name]

12:30 PM

1h

Women's Cut

[Client 2 name]

6:00 PM

45m

Men's Cut

[Client #3 name]

Projected Revenue

===================

I want to create an event in a Google Calendar for each appointment, and it seems like zapier MIGHT be able to do this, but all the help resources I can find are very general in nature.

Is this do-able on Zapier? If so, any nudges in the right direction would be awesome.

Any thoughts greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I had some time to kill and enjoy the odd challenge. So I have put together a solution that should do what you are looking for. I will break it down by steps.

TEMPLATE

---

Zapier Trigger - Step 1
Type: Trigger
Module: Gmail
Criteria: User Dependent
Comments: For the trigger zap you will want to use a Gmail specific trigger, something to the effect of "execute trigger on emails titled 'xyz'", or "emails labeled 'xyz'" if you setup a filter in your inbox.

Input screenshot:

Output Screenshot:

Zapier Action - Step 2
Type: Action
Module: Code (Python 3)
Comments: The Code offered by Zapier executes whatever (properly written) code you place in its container. It is especially handy as it allows you to incorporate data from previous steps in it through the use of a dictionary variable titled 'input_data'. Zapier offers the Code module in two languages: Javascript and Python. As I am most familiar with Python my solution for this step was written in Python. I will append the code to the end of this answer. Using the data held in the body of the email (retrieved in step 1) we can execute some string manipulations and datetime conversions to break apart the email into its component parts and pass those on to the following Action Step: Create Calendar Event.

Input Screenshot:

Output Screenshot:

Zapier Action - Step 3
Type: Action
Module: Google Calendar - Create Event
Comments: Using the data outputted from the previous code step we can fill out the required fields for creating a new appointment.

Input Screenshot: Output Screenshot:

PYTHON CODE

---

from datetime import timedelta, date, datetime
''' 
Goal: Extract individual appointment details from variable length email
Steps:
  Remove all extraneous and new line characters.
  Isolate each individual appointment and group its relevant details.
  Derive appointment start and end times using appointment time and duration.
  Return all appointments in a list.
'''

def format_appt_times(appt_dict):

  appt_start_str = appt_dict.get("appt_start")
  appt_dur_str = appt_dict.get("appt_length") 

  # isolate hour and minutes from appointment time
  appt_s_hour = int(appt_start_str[:appt_start_str.find(":")])
  if ("pm" in appt_start_str.lower()):
      appt_s_hour = 12 if appt_s_hour + 12 >= 24 else appt_s_hour + 12 

  appt_s_min = int(appt_start_str[appt_start_str.find(":") + 1 :
                                  appt_start_str.find(":") + 3])

  # isolate hour and minutes from duration time
  appt_d_hour = 0
  appt_d_min = 0
  if ("h" in appt_dur_str):
      appt_d_hour = int(appt_dur_str[:appt_dur_str.find("h")])
  if ("m" in appt_dur_str):
      appt_d_min = int(appt_dur_str[appt_dur_str.find("m") - 2 : appt_dur_str.find("m")])

  # NOTE: adjust timedelta hours depending on your relation to UTC
  # create datetime objects for appointment start and end times
  time_zone = timedelta(hours=0)
  tdy = date.today() - time_zone
  duration = timedelta(hours=appt_d_hour, minutes=appt_d_min)
  appt_start_dto = datetime(year=tdy.year,
                          month=tdy.month,
                          day=tdy.day,
                          hour=appt_s_hour,
                          minute=appt_s_min)
  appt_end_dto = appt_start_dto + duration

  # return properly formatted datetime as string for use in next step.
  return (appt_start_dto.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M"),
        appt_end_dto.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M"))

def partition_list(target, part_size):

  for data in range(0, len(target), part_size):
      yield target[data : data + part_size]

def main():

  # Remove all extraneous and new line characters.
  email_body = input_data.get("email_body")
  head,delin,*email_body,delin,foot = [text for text in email_body.splitlines() if text != ""]

  appointment_list = []
  # Isolate each individual appointment and group its relevant details.

  for text in partition_list(email_body, 4):
      template = {
          "appt_start" : text[0],
          "appt_end" : None,
          "appt_length" : text[1],
          "appt_title" : text[2],
          "appt_client" : text[3]
          }
      appointment_list.append(template)

  for appt in appointment_list:
      appt["appt_start"], appt["appt_end"] = format_appt_times(appt)

  return appointment_list

return main()

I am not sure of your familiarity with Python, or programming more generally, but the comments in the code explain what each section is doing. If you have any specific questions regarding aspects of the code let me know. Assuming your email template does not change this setup should work exactly as needed. Let me know if anything is unclear.

UPDATE

---

I thought it best to address your question in the original answer should anyone else have similar questions.

explaining how this code is removing the extra characters:

There is actually a fair bit going on in the first line, so I will do my best to break it down, and provide resources where necessary.

The code in question:

  head,delin,*email_body,delin,foot = [text for text in email_body.splitlines() if text != ""]

First step here was to break the text into manageable chunks. I did so with the line email_body.splitlines() which, by default, breaks strings into a list at each newline character found (you can specify your own delimiter).

If we were to inspect the list at this moment its contents would be something of the following:

["================", "", "Today's Schedule", "", "9:30 AM", "", "3h", ..., "[Client #3 name]", "", "Projected Revenue", "", "==================="]

You will notice there is a fair amount of information in there that we really don't want.

First lets look at the "" elements. These are left over as a result of the blank lines between each line of text, which even though they are blank do still have newline characters at the end of them. There a number of ways you could address this within python. We could simply write a for-loop to go through and copy all elements that are not "" to a new list.

To me this felt like additional work, and besides, Python offers list comprehension for just such a scenario. I won't go too deep into list comprehension as there is a lot that can be said about it, and in more insightful ways than I could muster, but it essentially allows you to provide logic against a set of 'data' to form a list. In this case, I specifically wanted to filter out the "" elements returned from the call to splitlines().

And so you will see I address this with the following line

[text for text in email_body.splitlines() if text != ""]

With that we have a list as above less the "" elements. Now we must turn our attention towards the more 'dynamic' garbage strings. Again there are a number of ways to do this. A, not particularly flexible, option could be to simply store the strings we want to remove in variables something to the effect of:

garb_1 = "==================="
garb_2 = "Projected Revenue"
garb_3 = ...

and once again filter the list with yet another for-loop. I instead chose to leverage Python's list unpacking idiom. Which allows us to 'unpack' list objects (and I believe tuples) into variables. As an example:

one, two, three = ["a", "b", "c"]

I'm sure you can guess what is happening above, as long as we provide the same number of variables as are in the list we can 'unpack' it in this fashion. But wait! In our case we don't know how long the list is going to be as it is entirely dependent on the number of appointments you have for any given day. Well this is where star unpacking enters to elevate the functionality. Using my code as the example:

head,delin,*email_body,delin,foot = [text for text in email_body.splitlines() if text != ""]

The *, in plain-English, is saying "I don't know how many elements to expect just give me all of them in a list". As we know that there will always be two lines of garbage at the beginning and end of the email we can assign them to throw away variables and capture everything in between using our variable length *email_body container.

With all of this complete we now have a list with only the data we are looking to capture. If, as you say, there are additional lines of garbage before or after the email_body, you can simply add additional throw away variables to account for them.

Once again feel free to ask any follow up questions.

Michael

Resources

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List Comprehension
Star Unpacking