Need to extract the url from an hyperlink based text from outlook which contains multiple url based hyper link in Power automate desktop

[AsheerHasan]

Hello Guys,

I want to extracts the hyperlink from outlook emails and need to open them on the browser to download the documents. Please assist me as I am unable to find any concreate solution on this.

[trice602]

Hi @AsheerHasan ,

I've done this several ways, several times.  Here's my most common path:

In this example, I am feeding Power Automate Desktop a couple hundred URLs from Column A and for each "CurrentItem", I am getting the next free row in Excel, then opening up the webpage given in step#7, collecting 3 data points from the website and storing them in a data table, and then writing those values to an Excel sheet.  In theory, this is the same process you will use to click on items you want to download and loop through URLs.

Please mark as a solution and/or give me a thumbs up for replying and offering help!  Always glad to help! Tom 👍🏽

[Nived_Nambiar]

Hi @AsheerHasan 

One question, does one outlook email has multiple URL present in it ?

Thanks & Regards,

Nived N 🚀

LinkedIn: Nived N's LinkedIn
YouTube: Nived N's YouTube Channel

🔍 Found my answer helpful? Please consider marking it as the solution!
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[Agnius]

It seems like @trice602 has misread your question, as this is related to retrieving URLs from an Outlook email and not an Excel file.

I can see you mentioned several hyperlinks in a single email. I would guess you use a Retrieve email messages from Outlook account action to retrieve your email messages. When you do that, you end up with a list of email messages stored in %RetrievedEmails% variable. 

I would suggest you use a For each loop on that list, so you are working with a single item at a time. You can then use %CurrentItem.Body% to get the body of the email. 

I would then suggest using Parse text with regular expressions to retrieve your URLs from the body. When you enable the "Is regular expression" toggle in the Parse text action, you can retrieve the matching string from your text. And when you disable the "First occurrence only" toggle, you can retrieve all matching strings, if multiple matches are found.

These will be stored in a variable called %Matches% and you can loop through it with another For each action, use Go to web page on each current URL, and do whatever you need done to download your documents.

A sample flow would look somewhat like this:

However, in order to provide the exact regular expression to get it, I would need to see a sample body of such an email.

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[trice602]

Sorry, I misread.  Tom

[AsheerHasan]

Thanks for your reply Nived. Yes, mail has multiple links.

[AsheerHasan]

Hi Agnius,

Thanks for your response. Please refer to the below email body for your reference. 

Bulletins

TIB-577

Discontinuation of the Compact Wired Remote Controller

number: TIB-577 | size: 180.0 KB

Application control guide

E20-124-1

Application Control Manual for the SMMS-u system

number: E20-124 | size: 25.0 MB

[AsheerHasan]

once we go to the web page, page requires to sign-in to download the documents. As all links are external site URLs and it requires to sing-in and then we can see the download button. Please assist me

[LokeshBysani]

@AsheerHasan  Thank you for sharing additional details. 

Following @Agnius instructions above I created the flow for your scenario. 

Variables.CreateNewList List=> URLList
Outlook.Launch Instance=> OutlookInstance
Outlook.RetrieveEmailMessages.RetrieveEmails Instance: OutlookInstance Account: $'''test.test@test.com''' MailFolder: $'''PAD''' EmailsToRetrieve: Outlook.RetrieveMessagesMode.All MarkAsRead: False Messages=> RetrievedEmails
LOOP FOREACH CurrentEmail IN RetrievedEmails
    SET mailBody TO CurrentEmail.Body
    Text.ParseText.RegexParse Text: mailBody TextToFind: $'''url=(.*?)&''' StartingPosition: 0 IgnoreCase: False OccurrencePositions=> Positions Matches=> Matches
    LOOP LoopIndex FROM 0 TO Matches.Count - 1 STEP 1
        Scripting.RunJavascript.RunJavascript JavascriptCode: $'''var encodedUrl = \"%Matches[LoopIndex]%\";
var decodedURL = decodeURIComponent(encodedUrl);
WScript.Echo(decodedURL);''' ScriptOutput=> DecodedURL
        Text.Replace Text: DecodedURL TextToFind: $'''url=''' IsRegEx: False IgnoreCase: False ReplaceWith: $'''%''%''' ActivateEscapeSequences: False Result=> DecodedURL
        Text.Replace Text: DecodedURL TextToFind: $'''&''' IsRegEx: False IgnoreCase: False ReplaceWith: $'''%''%''' ActivateEscapeSequences: False Result=> DecodedURL
        Variables.AddItemToList Item: DecodedURL List: URLList
    END
END
Outlook.Close Instance: OutlookInstance

 You can copy paste the above code in your desktop flow and test it. 

It will read through all the emails and if there are any hyper links then fetch the URL and add that to a list. You can then loop through each URL in list and perform necessary actions.  

[AsheerHasan]

Unable to add matches count -1

[LokeshBysani]

%Matches.Count-1%

[AsheerHasan]

Thanks for your quick respond. But I am still able to retrieve the full mail content instead of only URLS. Please refer to the below snapshot. 

[LokeshBysani]

May I know were you able to copy paste the exact Content I provide above in your power automate desktop. 

[AsheerHasan]

[AsheerHasan]

Yes Lokesh. I am able to do so. I attached the snapshots of my flow.

[LokeshBysani · Accepted solution]

ok I am not sure how you copy pasted the entire flow the values has additional quotes etc. 

1. Open desktop flow

2. create a new subflow and just an empty one with no actions. 

3. Copy the below content

Variables.CreateNewList List=> URLList
Outlook.Launch Instance=> OutlookInstance
Outlook.RetrieveEmailMessages.RetrieveEmails Instance: OutlookInstance Account: $'''test.test@test.com''' MailFolder: $'''PAD''' EmailsToRetrieve: Outlook.RetrieveMessagesMode.All MarkAsRead: False Messages=> RetrievedEmails
LOOP FOREACH CurrentEmail IN RetrievedEmails
    SET mailBody TO CurrentEmail.Body
    Text.ParseText.RegexParse Text: mailBody TextToFind: $'''url=(.*?)&''' StartingPosition: 0 IgnoreCase: False OccurrencePositions=> Positions Matches=> Matches
    LOOP LoopIndex FROM 0 TO Matches.Count - 1 STEP 1
        Scripting.RunJavascript.RunJavascript JavascriptCode: $'''var encodedUrl = \"%Matches[LoopIndex]%\";
var decodedURL = decodeURIComponent(encodedUrl);
WScript.Echo(decodedURL);''' ScriptOutput=> DecodedURL
        Text.Replace Text: DecodedURL TextToFind: $'''url=''' IsRegEx: False IgnoreCase: False ReplaceWith: $'''%''%''' ActivateEscapeSequences: False Result=> DecodedURL
        Text.Replace Text: DecodedURL TextToFind: $'''&''' IsRegEx: False IgnoreCase: False ReplaceWith: $'''%''%''' ActivateEscapeSequences: False Result=> DecodedURL
        Variables.AddItemToList Item: DecodedURL List: URLList
    END
END
Outlook.Close Instance: OutlookInstance

 4. paste it to the new subflow you created . You should see the values populated correctly.  If you follow the approach I mentioned you should see the parse text as this but in the image you showed the value is different 

Also if you copy paste correctly the variable values for Replace Text would be %DecodedURL% but in your screenshot it has Replaced and Replaced 2 

[AsheerHasan]

Thanks a lot, it works. Just one query these links are external sites URL hence I need to login into the site and then I am able to see the download button to download the documents. 

My scenario is every week I am getting these weekly emails to download the latest docs. Please assist the further steps as I am new into this. 

[LokeshBysani]

Glad to hear that the solution worked for you. If you find my response helpful, I would greatly appreciate it if you could mark it as the preferred solution and perhaps give it a Thumbs Up.

Now, with the list of URLs at your disposal, you might consider creating a separate subflow for each URL. Here's a suggested approach:

1. URL 1: Create a Subflow named Subflow1. Within this subflow, include all the necessary actions, such as the login process and downloading.

It's advisable to repeat this process for all the other URLs you have in your list.

If you encounter any further questions or uncertainties during the implementation, please feel free to initiate a new query. By doing so it will help for other users who encounter similar type of issues in future. 

[Agnius · Accepted solution]

The further steps are outside the scope of this topic. You should start a new one for the specific question of how to do the web automation part. You should also provide some screenshots of the web page.

The basic idea would be that you should put the web automation actions to inside the loop that iterates through the matches, so that the actions are performed on each URL.

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If I have answered your question, please mark it as the preferred solution. If you like my response, please give it a Thumbs Up.

I also provide paid consultancy and development services using Power Automate. If you're interested, DM me and we can discuss it.

[AsheerHasan]

Thanks a lot Lokesh. Need to address one thing, every week we have different URLs and every time the counts are different. So how we can tackle this, please?