How to get rich text formatting from asana task AP

Question

Asana added rich text formatting in June 2014 (https://blog.asana.com/2014/06/rich-text/)

How do you get the formatting metadata from the Asana API?

For example, if I fill in a task description with:

---

some bold text. some italic text

a list

• foo
• bar
• sublist
  • a
  • b
  • c
  • baz

---

The API returns the following for the note field, which excludes any formatting info:

"notes":"some bold text. some italic text\n\na list\n\nfoo\n\nbar\n\nsublist \na\nb\nc\nbaz"

Answer 1

Is this still something "experimental"? I didn't want to post an answer but it won't let me comment the existing answer. So far I have found: Acceptable <b> <ul> <li> Not acceptable: <h4> <p> <div> <section> <br>

Any other suggestions for something to do a linebreak? Back in the day, I was using Wufoo to directly create tasks in Asana and it formatted it with a bold heading and then regular text for each entry data. I am trying to achieve this on my own without going that route because I am also updating a database when I receive the form submission. Any ideas on how to format (only the most basic of formatting)?

Answer 2

We do not currently support rich text formatting via the API. However if you're feeling adventurous, we are currently working on this support, and you can try it out by using html_notes (for tasks) and html_text (for stories). You can request them using ?opt_fields=html_notes, for example.

Note however that this is still very experimental/early support. If the parser doesn't like the HTML you post, it just strips everything back to plaintext. So this is really only if you're feeling particularly adventurous - otherwise, I'd wait until we release full-fledged public support for it, with documentation and everything.