slackapi/hubot-slack

Match on raw text instead of formatted text on incoming messages

Open

#241 opened on Oct 9, 2015

View on GitHub
 (3 comments) (0 reactions) (0 assignees)CoffeeScript (2,339 stars) (637 forks)batch import
enhancementgood first issue

Description

This was originally filed at https://github.com/github/hubot/issues/1053 but I believe this to be an adapter specific problem. From @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?

I suggested this:

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

Contributor guide

Tech stack
javascriptnodejs
Domain
backend
Issue type
feature
DifficultyEstimated implementation difficulty for a new contributor, from 1 for very small changes to 5 for expert-level work.
2
Estimated timeA rough time range for an experienced contributor to investigate, implement, test, and prepare a pull request.
under 1 hour
Activity statusHow available the issue appears right now: fresh, active, stale, blocked, or waiting on maintainer input.
stale
ClarityHow clearly the issue explains the expected change, acceptance criteria, and next step.
clear
Prerequisites
Familiarity with CoffeeScript
Newbie friendlinessA 1-100 score estimating how approachable this issue is for first-time contributors.
50
Research direction
Focus on the slack.coffee file, specifically the message formatting logic around lines 153-192 where link formatting is stripped. Extend that logic to strip other formatting (bold, italic, etc.) before passing the text to the robot.hear function. Ensure the original formatted message is preserved via the rawMessage property as shown in lines 112-120. Test with messages containing various formatting to confirm the regex matches work on raw text.