Capturing an HTML tag by the tag properties

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Capturing an HTML tag by the tag properties

The text of the email body is available in plain text and in HTML. For capturing text from the HTML version of the email you can use XPath and CSS selectors but a more easy-to-use method is giving Email Parser a set of properties that a given HTML tag must meet:

Capture HTML tag by properties settings, top section showing tag name, class, and attribute filters

Scrolling down, additional options are available:

Capture HTML tag by properties settings, bottom section showing additional filtering and output options

The different settings correspond to the different parts of an HTML tag:

Anatomy of an HTML tag showing the tag name, attributes, and inner text

For example, in this email:

Sample order confirmation email with a bold estimated delivery date

The estimated delivery date is bold and the size is a bit larger than the rest of the text. Let’s take a look at the HTML code and locate where the delivery date is:

HTML source code of the email showing the delivery date inside a styled td tag

The text “Tuesday, October 21, 2014” is inside a <td> tag with some special styling. We take advantage of this and set up “capture HTML tag” as following:

Capture HTML tag by properties configured to match the styled td tag containing the delivery date

You will find that configuring this capture method requires a lot of trial and error. Usually, more than one HTML tag share the same styling and/or class names and you have to tweak the different options that Email Parser gives you in order to find what HTML styling differences the text you want to capture from the rest.