Strip formatting from messages?

[callumacrae]

We have a script which starts like this:

robot.hear /some sentence here/i, (msg) ->

However, it doesn't hear it if the words are formatted at all, e.g. "some sentence here".

Would it be possible / desired to remove formatting from messages before parsing them?

[tonydaly]

👍

[technicalpickles]

That is a good question. It's going to depend on the adapter I think, because not every one has rich formatting.

Which adapter are you using? I'd guess Slack.

[bhuga]

Receive middleware can solve this elegantly. It can edit the message before listeners attempt to match it. Here's an example that would let /ping also respond to a typo, /pnig:

module.exports = (robot) ->
  robot.receiveMiddleware (context, next, done) ->
    context.response.message.text = context.response.message.text.replace("pnig", "ping")
    next()

Hubot> /pnig
Hubot> PONG

If you can write a function to strip the formatting, you could replace the message text with the stripped message in a similar way.

[callumacrae]

Yeah, we're using Slack.

A middleware would work. Not sure I can think of any cases where I would want robot.hear to be specifically matched against a formatted message, though.

[technicalpickles]

Slack already has a place it strips formatting for links. That'd be a good place to do it for other things: https://github.com/slackhq/hubot-slack/blob/master/src/slack.coffee#L153-L192

I think it is going to be up to the adapters to strip formatting like this. They probably should preserve the raw message in case an adapter-specific script wants to do something about, like hubot-slack does here: https://github.com/slackhq/hubot-slack/blob/master/src/slack.coffee#L112-L120

[technicalpickles]

This is adapter specific, so I filed slackapi/hubot-slack#241 to track Slack doing something special with formatting.

[bkeepers]

Closing since this is being tracked in slackapi/hubot-slack#241