Parsing text from attached files

See also:
What is a field
Example. Parsing an attached PDF file

Email Parser gives you access to the contents of an email through fields. For example, the subject of the email is contained in a field simply called Subject, the body of the email is contained in a field called Body, and similarly there are fields for other parts of the email such as From, To, Date, and more.

The content of attached files works the same way. The text from an attached file is available in a field called AttachedFileContent. This field contains the plain text extracted from the attached file, regardless of the file format (PDF, Word, text files, etc.).

How to capture text from an attached file

To extract a specific piece of text from an attached file, the idea is to create a field in a Parser and attach it to the AttachedFileContent field at the top. This tells Email Parser that the field you are creating should look for text within the content of the attached file, rather than in the email body or subject.

The following image illustrates this concept. Notice how the field at the top of the parser is set to AttachedFileContent. This is the input that the parser will use to capture text from:

To set this up, you first add the AttachedFileContent field at the top of the parser, and then you create and attach another field below it to capture the specific text you need. The following animation shows how to do this step by step:

Full example: capturing a street address from an attached PDF

In this example, Email Parser receives an email with a PDF file attached. The PDF contains a street address that we want to capture. The following animation shows the complete workflow, from receiving the email to extracting the address from the attached PDF file: