Skip to main content
luisr0004
Known Participant
February 28, 2025
Solved

fn!extract does not like letter p??

  • February 28, 2025
  • 9 replies
  • 11 views

Hi All,

For any reason I can't imagine, if you run this instruction in a rule;

fn!extract("<a>some text</a>","<a>","</a>")

you will get {"some text"} as a result, which is what I expected.

But if you run this one

fn!extract("<p>some text</p>","<p>","</p>")

you get nothing as result.

Another example of this strange behaviour:

fn!extract("<l>some text</l>","<",">") returns {"l","/l"}, which is fine

fn!extract("<p>some text</p>","<",">") returns nothing, which is inexplicably to me

Any idea on why is that happenning?. I've tested that on Appian v25.1

Regards!

    Best answer by stefanhelzle0001

    This is a known issue. Find the knowledge base item here: community.appian.com/.../kb-1489-the-extract-function-is-unable-to-handle-html-line-breaks

    9 replies

    karumurua531442
    Participating Frequently
    February 28, 2025

    i think in this scenario, striphtml() might work?  since  striphtml() Converts an HTML string into plain Text by converting <br>, <p>, and <div> to line breaks, stripping all other tags, and converting escaped characters into their display values

    striphtml("

    some text

    ")

    luisr0004
    luisr0004Author
    Known Participant
    February 28, 2025

    Thank you for your answer Abishek, however I do not looking forward some workaround (I've already solved my need with regex). My intention when posting that is to know why fn!extract is working like this. ¿It is a bug or some weird undocumented behaviour?

    stefanhelzle0001
    Brainy
    February 28, 2025

    I can replicate this on 24.4. I suggest to open a support case to discuss this with Appian.

    karumurua531442
    Participating Frequently
    February 28, 2025

    So is there any special conditions that Appian would not parse <p> tags ?

    stefanhelzle0001
    Brainy
    February 28, 2025

    That's the question only Appian can answer.

    stefanhelzle0001
    Brainy
    February 28, 2025
    luisr0004
    luisr0004Author
    Known Participant
    February 28, 2025

    Thank you Stefan