substringBetween

Question

Trying to use this

{{issue.description.substringBetween("Serial number:"," Issue")}}

to parse this

An issue was closed for the Google Meet hardware 1.11 Uxbridge (abc, 1).

Issue: Missing monitor
Issue type: Peripheral
Issue opened: 2025-03-27T11:07:47+00:00
Issue closed: 2025-03-27T12:08:35+00:00
Annotated location: xyz
Asset id: -
Serial number: ABC12345
Issue id: 5880069409818180584
Google Admin Device Details page: url

This notification is managed in Google Admin > Devices > Google Meet
hardware > Settings and policies

OpsGenie Alert

But it returns an empty string; any ideas or pointers appreciated.

Christopher Yen · Answer

The leading space on Issue in your smart value could be something to check, you can try

{{issue.description.substringBetween("Serial number:", "Issue id:")}}

or possibly just the new line

Myles Boyd · Answer

Thanks Bill; giving that a try

Bill Sheboy · Answer

Hi @Myles Boyd

The problem is likely from the newline characters in the Description text causing the search to halt.  Many of the text functions have problems when there are newlines in the text.

The solution is to first replace all of the newlines with spaces:

{{issue.description.replace("
", " ").substringBetween("Serial number:"," Issue").trim()}}

I also added a trim() to the end to remove any stray spaces.

TIP: when you need the newlines for later processing, they could be replaced with some known text, parsed, and then replaced back to newlines.  For example, we could use a double-tilde ~~ as that seems unlikely to be used:

{{issue.description.replace("
", "~~").substringBetween("something", "somethingElse").trim().replace("~~", "
")}}

Kind regards,
Bill