Extract text from a comment to use in a field

[David Fawkes]

Hi i would like some advice on how to extract specific part of text from a comment. I am looking to extract a part of line so i can then paste this into a custom field. 

Any advice?

[Mikael Sandberg · Accepted solution]

Hi @David Fawkes,

Welcome to Atlassian Community!

You can do that with smart values and automation. The smart values for text fields have lots of options to extract substrings from a field. For example I am using this in one of our automations to find Prisma Alert Ids:

{{issue.description.substringBetween("This was Prisma Alert ",",")}}

[David Fawkes]

Thanks for this suggestion but i cannot get it to pick up the field from the comments. 

The text comes in via a comment as below and i want to take the U439090 section and put this in to a field in Jira. The number though will always be different.

..............................

Work Order No: U439090

Origination Date: 06/01/2023

Originator: eng-341

Asset Number: IZC12

Priority: D

[David Fawkes]

@Mikael Sandberg thanks see the note above do you have any other suggestions? 

Thanks

[Mikael Sandberg]

So something like this should do it for you assuming that it is the last comment:

{{issue.comments.last.body.substringBetween("Work Order No: ", "Origination")}}

[Morgan Watts]

Thanks for this. Had a similar request come in and this was an awesome answer. @Mikael Sandberg 

[Tschilar, Stacey]

I have a question on this - I can't seem to get the automation to work if my before string contains a colon? 

{{issue.description.substringBetween("Benefit Analysis","Acceptance Criteria")}}

The above works fine, but my issue description is usually in the form of Benefit Analysis: abcdef etc.

So I edited to {{issue.description.substringBetween("Benefit Analysis: ","Acceptance Criteria")}}

and now the automation doesn't return any text. Why is that? 

[Morgan Watts]

@Tschilar, Stacey Not that this comment solves the problem, but my string looks like yours when handling text with a colon. I'm parsing the last comment for onboarding information. 

{{issue.comments.last.body.substringBetween("Position/Title: ", "Department")}}

Maybe the ".body." portion of the smart value could make your automation work?

[Tschilar, Stacey]

Hmm, I tried this but am still getting blanks: 

{{issue.description.body.substringBetween("Benefit Analysis: ", "Acceptance Criteria")}}

[Morgan Watts]

Rats :/ 

[Mikael Sandberg]

@Tschilar, Stacey It should work even if the text contains colon, I have a parser that convert an email from Workday to extract data from it and it has colons in it. Does you comment that you are parsing by any chance contain white spaces/new lines in the part that you are trying to parse? And what are you doing with the parsed text? Are you trying to set a select list field with it?