Inbound emails containing HTML tables in the email body

[Jamsta1912]

Hi all,

I have a number of Inbound actions that process emails from customers. Among other things, the inbound actions typically grab the content of the email body, using email.body_text and put it in the description field of the new task.

Sometimes, customers include tabular data in the email, and it gets converted to text in the descrption field, but usually with a number of blank lines where the ends of table columns and tables would otherwise have been. Here's an example table:

This is some text	REF12345
Purpose of Email	Blah Blah Blah

CI Details
Name	Floor	Location	Address	Post Town/Code
My_CI	A/E	na,na
	B/E

When the text gets added to the description fields, I see several blank rows between 'Blah Blah Blah' and 'CI Details'. I've been trying to remove excess blank rows with   str.replace("\n\n", "") and str.replace("\r\r","") but I can't make them disappear. So I'm guessing the characters causing the blank rows are not actually new lines or carriage returns. Can anyone advise what characters might be being produced in the text where the HTML table tags would otherwise have been, causing the extra rows?

Jamie.

[Jamsta1912]

I should add... also getting blank rows between 'Purpose of Email' and 'Blank Rows'.

[mohamadcharafed]

Hi Jamie

The instance will convert the HTML to Text as soon as the email arrives. One more thing you can try is to enable the HTML Sanitizer :

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/jakarta-servicenow-platform/page/administer/security/task/t_Activ...

New lines might be '\r\n' when you are searching for them

Regards,

Mohamas

[Jamsta1912]

Hi Mohamad,

Thank you for your reply. I think I wan't very clear with my original question.   My issue is that when the system extracts the text from an email body containing HTML tables, superflous rows are added where the table related HTML tages would have been. So for instance, I have an Inbound Action linked on the incident table, with a script to put the text content of the email body into the description field:

var desc = email.body_text;
current.description = desc;
current.insert();

If I process an email with this body:

This is some text	REF12345
Purpose of Email	Blah Blah Blah

CI Details
Name	Floor	Location	Address	Post Town/Code
My_CI	A/E	na,na
	B/E

I get the very 'spacey' text below the three dashed lines below, in the description field of the incident. My question is how I do remove those extra line feeds?

Thank you

Jamie

---

This is some text

REF12345

Purpose of Email

Blah Blah Blah

CI Details

Name

Floor

Location

Address

Post Town/Code

My_CI

A/E

na,na

B/E

[mohamadcharafed · Accepted solution]

Hey jamie

To remove the new lines you can use :

var str = email.body_text.replace(/\n\n/g,"");

Regards

Mohamad