I have an email address that could either be
$email = "x@example.com"; or $email="Johnny <x@example.com>"
I want to get
$handle = "x"; for either version of the $email.
How can this be done in PHP (assuming regex). I'm not so good at regex.
Thanks in advance
I think you'd be better going down the email line at a time as it's the line breaks that are more critical in e-mail formation.
Your rules would be:
Something I remember from a long time ago - so the following may not be 100% accurate, but I'll mention just in case. Be careful with files with attachemnts as you can get two "boundary" markers. But one boundary is withing another boundary, so if you follow the rules above (i.e. grab the first boundary and stick with it) then you should be fine. But test your script with some attachemnts :)
Edit: additional info as asked in the question. An e-mail can have as many "bodies" as the user wishes to encode. You can have a plain, and HTML, a UTF encoded version, and RTF version or even a Morse Code version (if the client knew how to handle "Content-Type Morse/Code"!). Sometimes you don't get plain text, but only HTML versions (naughty users). Sometimes the HTML actually comes without the content type declaration (which may or may not get displayed as HTML, depending on the client). The boundary also splits off the attachments. Rich test is a gotcha from Outlook (although, to be fair, it usually IS converted to HTML). So no, there's somewhere between 0 and X bodies.
Using regular expression to validate emails is tricky
Try the following email as an input to your regex ie:^[w.-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+.[A-Za-z]{2,6}$
abc@b...com
You can read more about email regex validation at http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html
If you are doing this for an app then use email validation by sending an email to the address provided rather than using very complex regex.
A regular expression is quite heavy machinery for this purpose. Just split the string containing the email address at the @ character, and take the second half. (An email address is guaranteed to contain only one @ character.)
at face value, the following will work:
preg_match('~<([^>]+)>~',$string,$match);
but i have a sneaking suspicion you need something better than that. There are a ton of "official" email regex patterns out there, and you should be a bit more specific about the context and rules of the match.
Use the regex
<?([^<]+?)@then get the result from$matches[1].Here's what it does:
<?matches an optional<.[^<]+?does a non-greedy match of one or more characters that are not^or<.@matches the@in the email address.A non-greedy match makes the resulting match the shortest necessary for the regex to match. This prevents running past the
@.Rubular: http://www.rubular.com/r/bntNa8YVZt