oh my god not just paste it directly. I was encapsulating it in {{ }} 
yeah it’s definitely not obvious but when you’re passing those references as input to existing actions, the {{ }} is used to wrap expressions, and you can add any JavaScript you want within the brackets. But when you’re referencing variables in Node.js code steps, you don’t need that
You’re incredible. Thanks for the code references There are a TON of regex things I’ve been trying to accomplish that the formatting action seemingly didn’t support and I couldn’t understand why (probably because of the lack of flag support). Looks like I’ll have to modify those workflows and just use direct js
awesome, yeah feel free to share those other use cases too so we can make sure we modify the pre-built action to handle