XmlService.parse() not able to handle HTML tables - google-apps-script

Question

I am looking for help from this community regarding the below issue.
// I am searching my Gmail inbox for a specific email
function getWeeklyEmail() {
var emailFilter = 'newer_than:7d AND label:inbox AND "Report: Launchpad filter"';
var threads = GmailApp.search(emailFilter, 0, 5);
var messages=[];
threads.forEach(function(threads)
{
messages.push(threads.getMessages()[0]);
});
return messages;
}
// Trying to parse the HTML table contained within the email
function getParsedMsg() {
var messages = getWeeklyEmail();
var msgbody = messages[0].getBody();
var doc = XmlService.parse(msgbody);
var html = doc.getRootElement();
var tables = doc.getDescendants();
var templ = HtmlService.createTemplateFromFile('Messages1');
templ.tables = [];
return templ.evaluate();
}
The debugger crashes when I try to step over the XmlService.parse function. The msgbody of the email contains both text and HTML formatted table. I am getting the following error: TypeError: Cannot read property 'getBody' of undefined (line 19, file "Code")
If I remove the getParsedMsg function and instead just display the content of the email, I get the email body along with the element tags etc in html format.

Answer 1

Workaround
Hi ! The issue you are experiencing is due to (as you previously mentioned) XmlService only recognising canonical XML rather than HTML. One possible workaround to solve this issue is to search in the string you are obtaining with getBody() for your desired tags.
In your case your main issue is var doc = XmlService.parse(msgbody);. To solve it you could iterate through the whole string looking for the table tags you need using Javascript search method. Here is an example piece of code retrieving an email with a single table:
function getWeeklyEmail() {
var emailFilter = 'newer_than:7d AND label:inbox AND "Report: Launchpad filter"';
var threads = GmailApp.search(emailFilter, 0, 5);
var messages=[];
threads.forEach(function(threads)
{
messages.push(threads.getMessages()[0]);
});
return messages;
}
// Trying to parse the HTML table contained within the email
function getParsedMsg() {
var messages = getWeeklyEmail();
var msgbody = messages[0].getBody();
var indexOrigin = msgbody.search('<table');
var indexEnd = msgbody.search('</table');
// Get what is in between those indexes of the string.
// I am adding 8 as it indexEnd only gets the first index of </table
// i.e the one before <
var Table = msgbody.substring(indexOrigin,indexEnd+8);
Logger.log(Table);
}
If you are looking for more than one table in your message, you can change getParsedMsg to the following:
function getParsedMsg() {
// If you are not sure about how many you would be expecting, use an approximate number
var totalTables = 2;
var messages = getWeeklyEmail();
var msgbody = messages[0].getBody();
var indexOrigin = msgbody.indexOf('<table');
var indexEnd = msgbody.indexOf('</table');
var Table = []
for(i=0;i<totalTables;i++){
// go over each stable and store their strings in elements of an array
var start = msgbody.indexOf('<table', (indexOrigin + i))
var end = msgbody.indexOf('</table', (indexEnd + i))
Table.push(msgbody.substring(start,end+8));
}
Logger.log(Table);
}
This will let you store each table in an element of an array. If you want to use these you would just need to retrieve the elements of this array and use them accordingly (for exaple to use them as HTML tables.
I hope this has helped you. Let me know if you need anything else or if you did not understood something. :)