Substring Ampscript extracting url within quotes

Question

We have a use case where we’re pulling in a url from Salesforce CRM which contains the entire A tag. We’re looking to use Substring but can’t pull in the end of the URL before the quote.

• “” target=” won’t work,
• " target=" produces a quote at the end
• We’ve tried single quotes: ‘ “ target= “ ‘ with no luck.

Any ideas on how to extract the url below between the quotes to render in a call to action button in an email?

Request__c:Site_URL__c = <a href=”https://mycervello.com/?requestid=a0Y2i000003Upy0BBB&signature=%2HH2RWnDntoo3CmmyAySPy1qNvwoiTuTrubI8ovMv7aU%2D” target="_blank">Click here for the form</a>

Ampscript:

SET @emailLinklong= [Request__c:Site_URL__c]
SET @DP_StringBegin = " target="
SET @emailLink = Substring(@emailLinklong,10,Subtract(IndexOf(@emailLinklong,@DP_StringBegin),1))

Answer 1

This is kind of hacky, but should work if the input matches the syntax of your example:

SET @emailLinklong= [Request__c:Site_URL__c]
SET @rowSet = BuildRowsetFromString(@emailLinklong, "”")
SET @row = Row(@rowSet, 2)
SET @emailLink = Field(@row, 1)

How does this work?

BuildRowsetFromString() breaks your string into 3 different parts delimited by the ” character

Row Number  |  RowSet
------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    1       |  <a href=
    2       |  https://mycervello.com/?requestid=a0Y2i000003Upy0BBB&signature=%2HH2RWnDntoo3CmmyAySPy1qNvwoiTuTrubI8ovMv7aU%2D
    3       |  target="_blank">Click here for the form</a>

The resulting data is of the rowset data type, so you need to select the second row by using the Row() function and then pull it's contents with Field (this is not a rowset with multiple named fields, so using 1 as the parameter gets you the value you need).

Answer 2

The replace function could work.

var @Link
SET @Link = replace(@emailLink, "” target=","")

https://ampscript.guide/replace/