Send an email from a text variable

Question

Hi everyone, 
 
 I was trying to send an email from a process model (with the "send e-mail" node) where the text to be sent is a text variable that you write in a a!paragraphField. The problem is that in email that you recieve, the linebreaks of the text variable disappears. 
 This is what you see in the a!paragraphField 
 
 And this is what you recieve in the email 
 
 In the setup of the email node, in the message body, I only put the process variable that I get from the interface with the text. 
 So can anybody help me to see the same structure in the a!paragraphField and in the final email? 
 Thank you! 
 Sergio.

Mike Schmitt · Accepted Answer

Emails use HTML formatting, which inherently ignores basic line breaks (i.e. the char(10) and char(13) characters or any combination of the two). You would need to write functionality to find and replace any char(10) linebreaks with the html equivalent, "
". While you're at it, it's also a good idea to sanitize 3 other problematic characters - "<", ">", and "&", each of which should be replaced by their HTML equivalents. What I've gradually come up with is a "sanitization" expression rule that usually looks something like this: a!localVariables( local!characters: { "&", ">", "<", char(10), char(13) }, /* the ordering of these is important. */ local!replacements: { tohtml("&"), tohtml(">"), tohtml("<"), "
", "" }, reduce( fn!substitute, trim(ri!input), a!forEach( local!characters, { fv!item, local!replacements[fv!index] } ) ) )

Mike Schmitt · Answer

HTML also inherently ignores multiple consecutive spaces. However my function above uses trim() on the input which would have the same effect. I'd say remove the trim() command from the above code and see if that improves anything on your end (i'm not 100% sure one way or the other). If that doesn't work, you could probably also add another character to the "replacements" list for the "space" character and replace it with the HTML equivalent, which, off the top of my head, is something like "&nbsp;" ... though you might need to look that one up to verify.

Send an email from a text variable

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