Issue with pattern match in Jira automation

[Neil B]

I am trying to parse the description field of a ticket raised by a separate integration.

The description field contains:

*Organization:* ABCTECH
*Owner:* John Smith

And I am trying to set another field's value using:

{{issue.description.match("(?<=Organization:\* ).*")}}

Testing the regex separately returns the match, the automation runs, but the field is never populated.

[Bill Sheboy · Accepted solution]

Hi @Neil B -- Welcome the Atlassian Community!

Have you tried a simpler match expression to return the value, perhaps to the audit log before trying the field edit?

In my experience thus far, the regular expression handling for automation rules does not consistently implement the references in the documentation.  And, even within a rule some different rule components may lead to different behaviors...particularly when leading/trailing smart value expressions collapse to null.

Kind regards,
Bill

[Neil B]

Hi Bill - thanks. This could be my misunderstanding of how match works.

In my regex test with {{issue.description.match("(?<=Organization:\* ).*")}} against

*Organization:* ABCTECH
*Owner:* John Smith

I get no results. With a simpler {{issue.description.match(".*(Org).*")}} it does match and returns 'Org'.

When I test the regex elsewhere I get for "(?<=Organization:\* ).*"

And then for ".*(Org).*"

So it looks like match is returning group index 1?

[Bill Sheboy]

Yup...Maybe divide and conquer this one by splitting to lines to isolate the searching.  This worked for me when I tried your example description:

{{issue.description.split("\n").match(".*Organization:\*(.*)")}}

[Neil B]

That's great Bill, thanks! I'd used substringAfter/substringBefore as a quick workaround but this is much better.

[Rick van Twillert _TMC_]

I've been struggling with a similar case and i found that enabling dotall mode fixes it.

In dotall mode, the expression . matches any character, including a line terminator. By default this expression does not match line terminators.

You can enable this by adding the embedded flag expression (?s) in front of your expression.

[John Funk]

Hi Neil - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Can you share the rule that you have (screenshot)? And the Audit log for when you run it?

[Neil B]

Hi John - thanks!

[John Funk]

Thanks for sharing. And what does the value for the Summary field look like after the update? 

[Neil B]

just has ' org' in it (but is being changed from it's initial value 'New deal won')

[John Funk]

Glad Bill got you all fixed up.