HALP! How to Use Butler Wildcards & Patterns with Variable Text.

[Tara Thomas]

I'm (painfully) staggering through troubleshooting a long, annoying, and glitchy workflow.

I have setup an automation using Butler & Sendboard to fulfil digital orders from another platform, using pattern & wildcard.

Here's the existing rule;

when the description of a card contains "Customer Information {* } {* } {*} Customer Information", set custom field "First" to "{wildcard1}", set custom field "Last" to "{wildcard2}", set custom field "email" to "{wildcard3}"

I had it working for my test case with the third wildcard set to {* } where the email came immediately after the First Last, but unfortunately hadn't thought through the variations of address & billing that would come my way.

It's working to populate the custom field for First and Last but of course not email. I know why it's not working... but not how to fix it!

Here's the final hurdle:

I have managed to extract the first name & last name using the rule above, but the email address falls at differing places in the pattern.

How can I tell Butler to find the email address?

Here's an example of the text;

There is a looooong section with a bunch of irrelevant data first.... then Customer Information Tara Thomas 1234 Somewhere Street Suburb NSW 2283 AU tara@emailaddress.com.au  12345678 Billing Information ...1234 — Visa Tara Thomas AU tara@emailaddress.com.au 987654321 Customer Information Tara Thomas 1234 Somewhere Street Suburb NSW 2283 AU tara@emailaddress.com.au  12345678

I can only imagine that depending on the location and billing choices that the text between "Customer Information" and "Customer Information" will vary wildly.

Please, for the love of all that's good in this world, HALP! (Also, be gentle, I muddle through with Butler but that's about the extent of my skills)

PS - this is what I get for being so smug about finally getting this all worked out and prematurely sending out links to order the product. FML.

[Cody C_ · Accepted solution]

Nice work so far, you're on the right track! I think what I'd do is use two rules.

Your first one is great, keep that, but get rid of the third wildcard since it's only working for the first and last names currently.

Then you could try creating a second rule that tries to grab the email address. Here's what worked for me in my test:

when the description of a card contains "{* }@{* }", set custom field "email" to "{wildcard1}@{wildcard2}"

As long as there aren't other places in that long bunch of irrelevant data with an @ symbol, you should be good! Let us know how it goes.

[Tara Thomas]

Cody! Is it weird to say I love you? 

I love you. There. I said it.

Thank you so much, I KNEW there would be a way to do it but couldn't get there. I really appreciate your time.

[Cody C_]

Nope, thanks Tara, glad to help! The sleeve is the best place for the heart!