Regex for e-mail contacts name

[lothar4ever]

I need a Regex that let me filter the name of the contacts that software like Outlook Express usually adds when sending emails.

Example:
I have this string:
$string = '[e-mail], "richard" <[e-mail]>, "john" <[e-mail]>, <[e-mail]>';
And i want to have this:
'[e-mail], <[e-mail]>, <[e-mail]>, <[e-mail]>'

I know this is probably not hard, but don't know how to do it, tried everything i could think of.

Thanks.

PS: sorry for my english, is not my native language.

[i5513]

See Re: An email regex and its context, or the newer node Extracting email addresses

Regards,

[JavaFan]

For your given examples, it seems that /\S+@\S+/ will do.

[flexvault]

lothar4ever,

Why not show us something you tried?

You'll get a lot more help, if we have something to help analyze with you.

Just make sure to use <code> ... </code>.

[lothar4ever]

Things i've tried:
s/(?<=")[^"><]*(?=")//g
s/\".+?\<//g
There is a few more, but i don't remember them, there was so many tries, this where the last 2.

[flexvault]

lothar4ever,

You don't say where the data is coming from, so to get your $string to be what you want, you need to escape the '@' signs:

my $string = qq|sean\@gmail.com, "richard" <richard\@gmail.com>, "john
+" <john\@gmail.com>, <jack\@gmail.com>|;

For this, I would use 'split': ( tested code, but re-typed from X-Terminal ):

 my @email = split(/\,/,$string);
 for my $var( 0 .. $#email )
 {    print "$email[$var]\n";
      .....   # put additional code here 
 }

Now you have an array that you could use a regex or 'split' again on each element of the array in get the format you want. If the data is coming from disk, it maybe that each email address is on a line terminated with a 'CR'.

Hope this helps.

[sundialsvc4]

I suggest that you spend some time looking at the various Regexp::Common entries ...

Note:   Follow the search-link on that page and you will see that there are (currently...) 139 CPAN packages that fall under that category.   It is quite likely that the regex you are looking for has already been done, or that you will find something that can easily be adapted.

[Marshall]

Instead of trying to find the e-mail addresses, another approach is to take out the stuff that isn't one. Looks like the stuff between double quotes.

The regex matches any word character, ".", "," or space within double quotes and deletes that.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $string = '[e-mail], "richard J. Smith, M.D." <richard@gmail.
+com>, "john" <[e-mail]>, <[e-mail]>';

$string =~ s/\"[\w .,]+"//g;

print $string;
#[e-mail],  <[e-mail]>,  <[e-mail]>, <jack@gmail.
+com>