nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Extract email address from comment

Quang Nguyen_cnxw26

Hello,

My company is moving to a Quiet Scheme where we are creating all our own notifications. I am trying to create a rule that notifies users when they are @ mentioned in a comment. We are using our own instance, not the cloud one.

So far I have the following set up:

This identifies when [~ is in the comment body, so it triggers when a @ mention is made.

I am now trying to extract the email address from the comment body to be able to email that user, and have been unable to do so.

I have tried the following so far, copying and pasting suggestions from similar threads I found:

test 1 \[\~.*?\]
test 2 {{issue.comment.last.body.text("([a-zA-Z0-9_.+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+)")}}
test 3 {{issue.comment.last.body.match("([a-zA-Z0-9_.+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+)")}}
test 3 {{issue.comment.last.body.text.match("([a-zA-Z0-9_.+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+)")}}
test 4 {{issue.comment.last.body.text.substringBetween("o:","]")}} 
test 5 {{issue.comment.last.body.substringBetween("o:","]")}} 
test 6 {{issue.comment.last.body.substringBetween("*: ","\n")}}
test 7 {{issue.comment.last.body.text}}
test 8 {{issue.comment.last.body.html}}
test 9 {{issue.summary.substringBetween("\[\~","\]")}}

All of these are returning blanks, except for Test 7 and 8 which are returning the last comment body, however I would like to extract only the email address in the comment in a format where I can put it in the "to" field to send an email.

Thank you!

Quang

Accepted answers

Darryl Lee

Ahhhh, @Kalyan Sattaluri and @Bill Sheboy's discussion above made me realize there's possibly a much simpler solution.

IF your JIRA usernames are the same as the first part of your company's email addresses (which is fairly common, especially if you sync with Active Directory for your accounts), then you wouldn't need a lookup.

So if Jira username is something like quangn and your email is quangn@yourcompany.com, then this regular expression should work in the To: field for sending an Automation email:

@{{issue.comment.last.body.match("\[\~(.+?)\]").concat("@YOURCOMPANYDOMAIN.com"){{/}}

The rule is substantially simpler and faster, because it doesn't require an API lookup.

Unfortunately we are still unable to handle multiple mentions. In this case it's because Automation will apparently not accept a comma-delimited set of email addresses in the To: field.

Additionally, because we should handle the case of multiple mentions and at least send to the first mention (or as mentioned before, the last), we need to check for multiple recipients, and slightly adjust the regex to only grab the FIRST mention:

@{{issue.comment.last.body.match("\[\~(.+?)\]").first.concat("@YOURCOMPANYDOMAIN.com"){{/}}

(NOTE: If you have the latest version of Automation for Jira (9.0.1) you could instead create a variable and use that in the Mail action. Due to a migration issue we haven't upgraded to that version yet.)

Anyways, the somewhat simpler rule (without a lookup) looks like this:

Screenshot 2023-09-09 at 5.20.34 PM.png

All comments

Darryl Lee

I'm not sure how this would work, because when I type @ darryl to mention myself in a comment, it converts that to: [~darryllee], which is NOT an email address.

Are you saying that users have been trained (and are willing?!) to @ mention someone with @ darryl and then also type darryllee@youremail.host?

So a comment would look like:

Hey @darryllee (darryllee@youremail.host) can you be sure to take a look at this bug?

Because that... is some kind of training. :-}

Curt Holley

I agree with @Darryl Lee and will add: Why would you turn off ALL notifications (rather than curating and controlling them) and then try and reinvent the wheel with a bespoke system?

Quang Nguyen_cnxw26

{deleted}

Quang Nguyen_cnxw26

Thanks for your suggestions.

I believe the intent is that users were complaining about getting too many email notifications, and my company was solving this by turning them all off and then recreating only the activities we want notifications for via automations. That decision has been made and the quiet scheme will roll out soon. I have been asked to help with creating these notifications.

As for the code above,

{{issue.comment.last.body.text}}

converts to "test message Nguyen Quang (CYSC)" which is my name and a code for my position.

{{issue.comment.last.body.html}}

converts to the same, except 'Nguyen Quang (CYSC)' is a link to my Jira profile page.

I am trying to convert 'Nguyen Quang (CYSC)' in either message to a usable email, to use in the To field to send an email.

We are also on the Jira Data Center, not Jira Cloud, if that helps.

Kalyan Sattaluri_iinm1n

Below regex extracts email address from last comment but its returns it twice because email address is hyper linked (?).. Maybe you can see if you can customize this?

@{{issue.comments.last.body.match("([a-zA-Z0-9_.+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+)")}}

Darryl Lee

Oof. I'm sorry to hear that leadership made such a poor decision.

But hey, one bad idea deserves another right? So let's get hacking!

Regex

Ok, so the regex you want is this:

{{issue.comment.last.body.match("\[\~(.+?)\]").first|issue.comment.last.body.match("\[\~(.+?)\]")}}

(A great resource for writing and testing regular expressions is https://regex101.com/ - that links to the regex above.)

You may be asking yourself, what's the deal with the repetition?

Well, it's because Automation's match() operator will return a single captured group if there is only one match, but if there are more than one (say somebody mentions [~nguyenquang] and [~darryllee]), then it will return a list containing all the matches, so something like: nguyenquang, darryllee

Now, you might be thinking - that's awesome! I can mail both people!

NOPE! because we're not done yet.

You'll notice in my example that what you're matching is the darryllee in [~darryllee]. You'll also notice that darryllee is not an email address.

SO! Now we have the fun task of looking up the email address for the user. But because Automation for Jira Data Center does not yet have the "Advanced branching" functionality (see JIRAAUTOSERVER-749) that would let you iterate through your list of multiple users, we only can do this lookup for the first person mentioned. Or, if you want, the last. But sadly, not all of them.

Lookup Email

OK, looking up an email address for a username. For that, you're going to have to make a call to the REST API, and you'll be calling doing that with the "Send web request" described in this article.

NOTE: In that article, they are talking about Jira CLOUD, not Data Center, so you will need to do a few things differently than it specifies:

Here are on-prem instructions to Set up a Personal Access Token
You will not need to base64 encode your username+token
Your Authorization header will be: Bearer <yourToken>

You should then be able to follow the instructions ahead, but instead use this URL:

https://YOURJIRASERVER/rest/api/2/user?username={{issue.comment.last.body.match("\[\~(.+?)\]").first.urlEncode|issue.comment.last.body.match("\[\~(.+?)\]").urlEncode}}

Yeah, that's ugly. Oh, and unlike the example, we can't put that into a variable because Automation for Jira Data Center doesn't support them yet. (Oh wait, they just added it! See JIRAAUTOSERVER-22. Well we had some problems with that version of Automation.)

ALSO, had to add urlEncode to the URL in case you have some non-ascii characters in your usernames.

It should look something like this:

Screenshot 2023-09-08 at 9.56.58 PM.png

So yeah, after you make that Web Request, it returns the response in {{webhookResponse}} and you can get the email out of that via {{webhookResponse.body.emailAddress}}.

The final rule

Anyways, the end product should look something like this: (Oh yeah, I use an IF at the beginning to make sure the Comment has a mention in it at all.)

Screenshot 2023-09-08 at 9.56.49 PM.png

Whew. That's kind of ugly. But there you have it!

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Kalyan Sattaluri -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Once you have two results for the email address, you could convert that value to a list, and then grab the first one with either .first or .get(0) added to the end of the expression.

However, that only works for linked email address values. If the source is instead a mention, it must be looked up as @Darryl Lee suggests.

Kind regards,
Bill

Darryl Lee

Ahhhh, @Kalyan Sattaluri and @Bill Sheboy's discussion above made me realize there's possibly a much simpler solution.

So if Jira username is something like quangn and your email is quangn@yourcompany.com, then this regular expression should work in the To: field for sending an Automation email:

@{{issue.comment.last.body.match("\[\~(.+?)\]").concat("@YOURCOMPANYDOMAIN.com"){{/}}

The rule is substantially simpler and faster, because it doesn't require an API lookup.

Unfortunately we are still unable to handle multiple mentions. In this case it's because Automation will apparently not accept a comma-delimited set of email addresses in the To: field.

@{{issue.comment.last.body.match("\[\~(.+?)\]").first.concat("@YOURCOMPANYDOMAIN.com"){{/}}

Anyways, the somewhat simpler rule (without a lookup) looks like this:

Screenshot 2023-09-09 at 5.20.34 PM.png

Quang Nguyen_cnxw26

Thanks so much Darryl for this! As someone who only knows the very basics of regex, it always seems like black magic to me when someone manages to hack something together like your code.

Manually concatenating is a really clever workaround. Unfortunately my email is quang.nguyen2@company.com, probably because I have a (relatively) common first and last name. I suspect your RegEx above would work for about 99% of emails, which is so painfully close, but I think actually looking up the email may be the only way to guarantee accuracy.

I've been really trying to avoid using API calls because I have never used them before, but I've seen enough answers in other threads that rely on APIs that I think I just need to bite the bullet and really go out of my comfort zone for a while. This one's for all the Nguyens and Lees and Smiths of the world.

Thank you again for putting together such thorough documentation in your other reply. I will definitely need it

Quang Nguyen_cnxw26

I am going to accept this answer for anyone in the future who works at a smaller company, where this wouldn't be as much of an issue.

Darryl Lee

Hey Quang - is your username in Jira not also quang.nguyen2?

By Username I mean what you see at https://YOURJIRAINSTANCE/secure/ViewProfile.jspa