[X4U] Extracting data from an email

[Doug McNutt]

At 11:34 -0500 7/17/10, Russell McGaha wrote:
Andy;
	You've got two main approaches:
		export the mails as some form of text and use Applescript and/or Shell, scripts to manipulate it into a CSV file for FileMaker.
		get SMPTit [a Filemaker plugin] to get the email directly into file maker and manipulate it/them there.

Russell

On Jul 17, 2010, at 11:14 AM, Andy wrote:

I want to extract some data from emails sent from a shopping cart. The data will be something like Product: xxxx
Order No: xxxx, Name: xxxx, Address: xxxx etc.
The emails will arrive as either html or plain text. I want to be able to automatically extract this data and insert it into a Filemaker database.
I know I can run a script from a Rule in Mail or Entourage to save/export the emails as plain text but how to get the data into a form that Filemaker can use?
Or is there some other way of doing this?

OX neXt ships with a UNIX tool called the "Practical Extraction and Repot Language".

Its name in the file system is /usr/bin/perl.  The learning curve is a bit steep but there are lots of books about it. There is also extensive support on the web. It helps to know at least a bit of the C language but it's not an absolute requirement.

But it was written for exactly the problem that you describe. I use it regularly for extracting financial data from web pages and reformatting it for entry into Excel.

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