Capture Email address

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

I am using this statement

if (/(abuse\@.*?)\s/)

This works fine as long as the email address is surrounded by white space. But sometimes the email address is enclosed with special characters, like this <abuse@tel2.con.it> or [abuse@bog-cnn.jp] or \abuse@fars.stores.info\

((abuse\@.*?)\s/) captures the ending non-alpha characters like this abuse@tel2.con.it> which I don’t want.

I tried this to tighten it up (/(abuse\@[\w\.-_]+)\s/) but it finds nothing.

What is correct syntax??

20040620 Edit by Corion: Added formatting

Comment on Capture Email address Select or Download Code

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Re: Capture Email address by davido (Cardinal) on Jun 20, 2004 at 17:15 UTC
Since the regexp to match an email address can become grotesquely complex (and still not work 100% of the time), you might as well utilize the work that's already been done on the subject... Email::Find. The description of that module is: "Find RFC822 email addresses in plain text." Dave	[reply]
Re^2: Capture Email address by vek (Prior) on Jun 20, 2004 at 18:08 UTC
I second the Email::Find recommendation. I've used it in the past to do exactly the same kind of thing the OP is describing. -- vek --	[reply]
Re: Capture Email address by muba (Priest) on Jun 20, 2004 at 17:12 UTC
Find out what characters are allowed in domain names. IIRC, they are a-z, 0-9, ".", "_" and "-". Make a character class of it: `if ( /(abuse\@[a-zA-Z0-9\.\-]+)/ )` [download] Note: untested	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Capture Email address by graff (Chancellor) on Jun 21, 2004 at 02:18 UTC
Your "tightened up" version ( `/(abuse\@[\w\.-_]+)\s/`) has a couple of problems, and you should read enough of "perlre" man page to understand them. The character-class (the part between square brackets) is actually defining a range that includes all characters in the ascii set between the period (0x2e) and underscore (0x5f), which would still include backslash, square brackets and angle brackets. I think you intended to do something like this: `/(abuse\@[-.\w]+)/` [download] Note that \w covers alphanumerics and underscore, the dash needs to go first (or last) so that it doesn't create a range, the period does not need to be escaped in a character class definition, and you don't need/want to force a match of a following white-space character at the end of the regex. In any case, using a module as mentioned in previous replies is likely to be the better way to go.	[reply] [d/l] [select]