Formatting Patreon members CSV into Thank You list

Hey fellow automators,

I was wondering if you might be able to help shorten the number of automations I’m currently using to acomplish something. I’m trying to do this all on iOS. I’ve got Drafts, Workflow, and Numbers to work with.

I have a Patreon for my comic Incredible Doom, about teens in the early 90s getting into trouble over the early internet. Each month Patreon provides me with a CSV of all my Patrons, their pledge level, address, email, etc.

Here’s a link to an annonomzied version of what they give me. https://www.dropbox.com/s/c800v24bnb9wpih/Demo%20Patreon%20Info.csv?dl=0

I use this to create a paragrah of thank yous that I include in the back of each comic I publish.

The finished thank yous look like this:

Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed.

As far as I can tell, here’s what needs to be done.

  1. Remove all the data that isn’t first or last name, like the catagory titles, the addresses, email address, etc So the CSV looks like this:
    Johnny, Appleseed
    JOHNNY, APPLESEED
    johnny, appleseed
    Johnny, Appleseed

  2. Remove the comas between first ans last name, so it looks like this
    Johnny Appleseed
    JOHNNY APPLESEED
    johnny appleseed
    Johnny Appleseed

  3. add a coma and a space after each name, so it looks like this:
    Johnny Appleseed,
    JONNY APPLESEED,
    johnny appleseed,
    Johnny Appleseed,

  4. Remove the line breaks, so it looks like this:
    Johnny Appleseed, JONNY APPLESEED, johnny appleseed, Johnny Appleseed,

  5. Convert the case so everything is camel case, like this:

Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed, Johnny Appleseed,

Here are the seteps I currently do:

  1. Open the CSV in Numbers and manually remove all the cells that ARENT first or last name.
  2. Export back to CSV
  3. Open the CSV in Drafts
  4. use find and replace to remove all the commas that appear between the first and last name.
  5. copy and paste everything into this web tool to add a comma and a space after each line. https://textmechanic.com/text-tools/basic-text-tools/add-prefixsuffix-into-line/
  6. Manually remove all the line breaks in Drafts.app
  7. Use “Case Toggle” in drafts to convert the first letter of every word to Upper case and all the rest to lower case.

It seems like something that may be able to all be done in drafts.app providing I remove the cells that don’t contain names in Numbers.app first. What do you think?

I helped someone make a Workflow that parsed this information - it’s actually easier as you can specify which cells to grab in each line, combine them with commas and do the date formatting.