CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rubyregexstring
Shpigford
Shpigford

Reputation: 25328

How to pull the email address out of this string?

Here are two possible email string scenarios:

email = "Joe Schmoe <[email protected]>"
email = "[email protected]"

I always only want [email protected].

So what would the regex or method be that would account for both scenarios?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 370

Answers (4)

cdeszaq
cdeszaq

Reputation: 31280

If those are the only two formats, don't use a regex. Just use simple string parsing. IF you find a "<>" pair, then pull the email address out from between them, and if you don't find those characters, treat the whole string as the email address.

Regexes are great when you need them, but if you have very simple patterns, then the overhead of loading in and parsing down the regex and processing with it will be much higher than simple string manipulation. Not loading in extra libraries other than what is very core in a language will almost always be faster than going a different route.

Upvotes: 2

OnResolve
OnResolve

Reputation: 4032

If you know your email is always going to be in the < > then you can do a sub string with those as the starting and ending indexes.

Upvotes: 2

Joshua Cheek
Joshua Cheek

Reputation: 31726

This passes your examples:

def find_email(string)
  string[/<([^>]*)>$/, 1] || string
end

find_email "Joe Schmoe <[email protected]>" # => "[email protected]"
find_email "[email protected]"              # => "[email protected]"

Upvotes: 3

DGM
DGM

Reputation: 26979

If you are willing to load an extra library, this has already been solved in the TMail gem: http://lindsaar.net/2008/4/13/tip-5-cleaning-up-an-verifying-an-email-address-with-ruby-on-rails

TMail::Address.parse('Mikel A. <[email protected]>').spec
=> "[email protected]"

Upvotes: 0

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