powerhouse has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

If I have a string which contains this: $string = 'To: <someemail@somedomain.tld>'; How can I strip off everything except the email address?

Or if It was something like this: $string = 'To: someemail@somedomain.tld'; And I have no way of knowing if it has more or not. If I knew it contained only the latter example, I could just split it by the blank space between the : and the some...

It might even contain more than that, such as $string = 'To: You and I <somemail@somedomain.tld>'; Or the like.

Is there a simple way of getting rid of everything EXCEPT the email address?

thx,
Richard

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Strip everything but an email address
by dominix (Deacon) on Feb 14, 2004 at 05:24 UTC
    "everything EXCEPT" is too huge to describe so your question is actually, "How do I match an email adresse, then I can drop the rest". and it have been often asked over here. an the usual response is use Email::Valid. in your case if you want to rely on a regex look at this example from Mastering regular expression
    anyway keep in mind : what should you match here ? q/to: "me@me.fr" <to@to.pf> /
    --
    dominix
[reply]
Re: Strip everything but an email address
by bart (Canon) on Feb 14, 2004 at 09:27 UTC
    I use Mail::Address from MailTools for this. 
    use Mail::Address;
my $string = 'To: someone <someemail@somedomain.tld>, "someone else" <
+someoneelse@some.other.domain>, info@somewhere.com (info address)';
my @address = map $_->address, Mail::Address->parse($string);
{
    local $\ = "\n";
    print for @address;
}

    [download]
    Result: 
    someemail@somedomain.tld
someoneelse@some.other.domain
info@somewhere.com
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Strip everything but an email address
by Anonymous Monk on Feb 14, 2004 at 05:17 UTC 

    my @emails = (
  'To: <firstone@somewhere.com>',
  'To: You and I <secondone@somewhere.com>',
  'To: thirdone@somewhere.com'
);

for (@emails) {
  /^To:\s*[^<]*<([^>]+)>/ || /^To:\s*(.+)$/;
  print $1, $/;
}

    [download]

[reply]
[d/l]

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