

Turn Gtalk Into A Command Line for the Web With Zapier - bryanh
https://zapier.com/blog/2013/04/29/turn-gtalk-into-a-command-line-for-anyone/

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prakster
Brian, whenever we bill the monthly subscription fee to our users for our saas
app, we send them an email with their username and the amount. I get a copy of
each such email in my gmail inbox. Is there a way I can use Zapier to parse
the amounts into a google spreadsheet so I know the total amount billed for
the day? (Currently I have to do this manually by opening each email and
copying the username and amount inot a google spreadsheet).

I should have our dev build this report, but don't get me started on that rant
:-)

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bryanh
Interesting use case!

Unfortunately we don't have that clever of a parser. We've definitely talked
about it but aren't 100% sold on any sort of internal implementation.

We've thought about a "reverse template" where you would mark blocks of text
as "variables" across a few examples and we'd parse it out. Not sure if that
is feasible though...

Any HN'ers done this before and have ideas or tips?

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gingerlime
I think postmark and mandrill (and maybe others) do inbound email processing
and then fire a webhook. Maybe hooking those together via zapier could provide
a solution? I haven't actually used any inbound mail processing yet (or I'm
ashamed to admit, zapier), but it sounds doable.

p.s. Hey Bryan!

~~~
bryanh
We definitely support catching inbound email
(<https://zapier.com/zapbook/email/> and <https://zapier.com/zapbook/mailgun/>
comes to mind). I'm curious if there is a clever parsing solution...

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asafira
Dumb question: let's say I want to link gchat with twitter, and all the text
after "tweet " I send to the zapier bot I want to be tweeted. Naively, I set
things up (pretty easily, too!) to tweet ALL of the text I sent to the zapier
bot. Is there an easy way to be able to tweet just parts of text? (maybe
following a regexp, altho that's already getting too sophisticated for
something so simple, especially since you guys just posted into turning gchat
into a command line)

~~~
mikeknoop
Yup there is. Check out our variable syntax:
[https://zapier.com/support/questions/119/passing-named-
varia...](https://zapier.com/support/questions/119/passing-named-variables-
through-to-writes-advanced-tip/)

It's certainly much simpler than a regex but imposes more structure. We're
always open to suggestions, so let me know if you've got any cool ideas on how
we can parse smarter.

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kareemk
This reminds me of a side project I've been working: <http://autobot.io>. Idea
is to have a chat bot in your email that can handle mundane tasks. I started
with scheduling as that's a particularly acute pain-point for me.

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kunle
Awesome idea guys! We've been doing some of this with Hipmob - giving users
commands to interact with all their integrations but we're purely CRM/Chat -
this is an insanely useful tool.

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bryanh
We were largely inspired by GitHub's Hubot in writing this list of examples.
Additionally, it's fairly trivial to use our developer platform to spin up
new, private actions for custom services and APIs.

Happy to answer questions!

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pbreit
Can you provide a bit more explanation on to set up something like this? Is it
a Zapier feature? The article just lists 5 faves and skips the "turning Gtalk
into" part.

~~~
mikeknoop
Sure, I can elaborate. The article assumed a little bit of familiarity with
Zapier. The basic mechanics are creating a new Zap on Zapier (which is a pair
of one trigger and one action).

For the trigger, choose "GTalk" and "New Message". Specifically, the Zap will
trigger whenever you send a message to our always-on bot.

You can pick any action that suites you, see the article for ideas.

We'll automatically perform the action whenever the trigger occurs.

There is a lot of flexibility in the system but that's the 500 foot view.

~~~
toki5
That's really cool -- certainly very nifty for Zapier users.

The title, though, implies a service (or hack) that isn't dependent on any
other system -- maybe it might be better titled "Turn Gtalk into a Command
Line for the Web using Zapier" or something?

~~~
bryanh
Good call! I've updated it.

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sturmeh
I've been doing this for a while with Ifttt, which has some instant hooks and
no stupid limits.

