OTP Verification in Playwright Without Regex

Every developer who has written a Playwright test for OTP verification has written this line: const otp = email . body . match ( / \b\d{6}\b / )?.[ 0 ]; It works. Until it doesn't. The email body changes format. The OTP appears inside an HTML table. The sending service wraps it in a <span> . Your regex matches a phone number instead of the code. The test fails intermittently and you spend an hour debugging something that has nothing to do with the feature you're testing. The regex problem OTP extraction via regex is brittle by nature. You're pattern-matching against a string that your email sending service controls — not you. Any time the template changes, your tests break. Here's what a typical OTP test looks like today: import { test , expect } from ' @playwright/test ' ; import { ZeroDrop } from ' zerodrop-client ' ; const mail = new ZeroDrop (); test ( ' user can verify OTP ' , async ({ page }) => { const inbox = mail . generateInbox (); // 1. Trigger OTP send await page . goto ( ' /login ' ); await page . fill ( ' [data-testid="email"] ' , inbox ); await page . click ( ' [data-testid="submit"] ' ); // 2. Wait for email const email = await mail . waitForLatest ( inbox , { timeout : 15000 }); // 3. Extract OTP — the fragile part const otp = email . body . match ( / \b\d{6}\b / )?.[ 0 ]; if ( ! otp ) throw new Error ( ' OTP not found in email body ' ); // 4. Enter OTP await page . fill ( ' [data-testid="otp"] ' , otp ); await page . click ( ' [data-testid="verify"] ' ); await expect ( page ). toHaveURL ( ' /dashboard ' ); }); The test works — but line 14 is carrying all the risk. Change the email template and the test breaks. Add a phone number to the footer and the regex matches the wrong number. Send a 4-digit OTP instead of 6 and you need to update the pattern. OTP extraction at the edge ZeroDrop extracts OTPs before they reach your test. The Cloudflare Worker that catches incoming emails runs a pattern match on the plain-text body and stores the result alongsi