in reply to
finding emails
If you are like me and cannot come up with a clever single regex pattern
that satifies all the possible patterns you can resort to
something like I did for finding various dates in a text file.
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $lineN = 1;
while(<DATA>){
for my $dateFormat ( qw (
\D\(\d\d\/\d\d\/\d\d\)\D
\D\(\d\d\/\d\d\/\d\d\d\d\)\D
\D\(\d\d\d\d/\d\d\/\d\d\)\D
\D\(\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\)\D
\D\(\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\)\D
\D\(\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\d\d\)\D
^\(\d\d\/\d\d\/\d\d\)\D
^\(\d\d\/\d\d\/\d\d\d\d\)\D
^\(\d\d\d\d/\d\d\/\d\d\)\D
^\(\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\)\D
^\(\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\)\D
^\(\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\d\d\)\D
\D\(\d\d\/\d\d\/\d\d\)$
\D\(\d\d\/\d\d\/\d\d\d\d\)$
\D\(\d\d\d\d/\d\d\/\d\d\)$
\D\(\d\d\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\)$
\D\(\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\)$
\D\(\d\d-\d\d-\d\d\d\d\)$
) ) {
my @dates = ( /$dateFormat/g);
for ( my $i=0; $i<=$#dates; $i++ ) {
my $date = $dates[$i];
print "Found $date on line $lineN\n";
}
}
$lineN++;
}
__DATA__
On 11/11/02 I sent a email and it didn't get there until 11/15/2002
Sometime there is no date.
But then again there one date like 12/31/99 on the line
and this 123/12/2002 is not a date.
maybe
