I’ve been experimenting with pattern matching using something like \b(\w) to target word beginnings, but I’m not sure if this approach works with Zapier’s formatter. The main challenge is that I need to exclude common words like “A”, “As”, “The”, “An”, “Of” etc. from becoming hashtags.
Has anyone successfully implemented this kind of text transformation in Zapier? What’s the best approach to filter out these connecting words while keeping the important terms?
i totally feel ya! zapier can be a bit whacky for this. using a webhook is a clever idea - it lets you easily skip over those annoying common words. good luck!
Been using Zapier for content marketing and found a trick that works well. Skip trying to do everything at once - use the text formatter’s “Extract Pattern” action first to grab words longer than 2 characters. This kills most stopwords since they’re usually short. Then run another formatter to capitalize and add the hash symbol. It’s not perfect but catches about 90% of what you want to exclude without needing a lookup table. Set the pattern to match 3+ character words and it naturally filters out “A”, “As”, “Of” etc. Works great for my client’s Instagram posts.
Had the same problem last year when I was automating hashtag generation for our company blog. Zapier’s regex formatter is pretty limited for this stuff. Here’s what actually worked: I split it into two steps. First, use the formatter to split text by spaces. Then use a lookup table to filter out stopwords. Just create a lookup table with common words like “a”, “an”, “the”, “of”, “as” and map them to empty values. That way only the meaningful words get the hashtag prefix. Not as clean as one regex, but way more reliable in Zapier. Then the formatter’s replace function adds the # symbol to what’s left.