CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregexemailpreg-replace
Arun SS
Arun SS

Reputation: 1911

replace . from email address

I have a text string. That may or maynot contain email addresses. I want to replace all . (fullstop) to dot.

blah blah [email protected]  fooo some content and email again

to 

blah blah abcd@gmail dot com  fooo some content and email again

Can I do this using regex?

-Thanks Arun

Upvotes: 0

Views: 564

Answers (2)

Tim Pietzcker
Tim Pietzcker

Reputation: 336238

If you had the .NET regex engine at your disposal, you could do it in a single regex by searching for (?:.(?=\S+@)|(?<=@\S+).) and replacing all matches with dot.

In PHP, you'd have to do it in two steps/iteratively:

Search for \.(?=\S+@) and replace with dot:

$subject = preg_replace('/\.(?=\S+@)/', ' dot ', $subject);

This will replace all dots in email addresses that occur before the @. Then search for (@\S+)\. and replace with \1 dot; repeat this until there are no further matches.

Something like

while (preg_match('/(@\S+)\./', $subject)) {
    $subject = preg_replace('/(@\S+)\./', '\1 dot ', $subject);
}

This will match a dot inside an email address after the @, but since PHP's regex engine doesn't support infinite lookbehind, I need to reapply the regex to the string as many times as the maximum number of dots after the @. For example, in the string @foo.bar.com, it will first match @foo.bar. and replace with @foo.bar dot. Then, in the next run, it replaces @foo. with @foo dot.

Upvotes: 3

Geoffrey Wagner
Geoffrey Wagner

Reputation: 818

Step one Regex Get Email handle from Email Address and / or https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36261/test-expand-my-email-regex

Step two regex to replace "foo-some white space-bar" with "fubar"

Taking the teach a man to fish approach.

Upvotes: 0

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