Regular Expression to find all Email Matches help for C# application

Question

I have an application where I need to parse a string to find all the e-mail addresses in a that string. I am not a regular espression guru by any means and not sure what the differnce is between some expressions. I have found 2 expressions that, apprently, will match all of the e-mail addresses in a string. I cannot get either to work in my C# application. Here are the expressions:

/\b([A-Z0-9._%-]+)@([A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4})\b/i

^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$

Here is an example string:

Adam
<mailto:[email protected]?subject=Your%20prospect%20Search%20-%20ID:
%2011111>  Edwards - Prospect ID: 11111, Ph: (555) 555-5555 
Al
<mailto:[email protected]?subject=Your%20prospect%20Search%20-%20
ID:%20222222>  Grayson - Prospect ID: 222222, Ph: 
Angie

Here is the code in c#:

var mailReg = new Regex(EmailMatch, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase | RegexOptions.Multiline);
var matches = mailReg.Matches(theString);

Answer 1

The first of your two examples should work if you remove the \b from both ends. The \b means that it expects a word boundary (a space, end of line, &c.) before and after the email address and this is not present in your case.

(Please do not use your new found powers for evil.)

Answer 2

This expression worked: ([a-zA-Z0-9_-.]+)@([a-zA-Z0-9_-.]+).([a-zA-Z]{2,5})

Thanks for looking!

Answer 3

The first regex is a Perl object (delimited by slashes). Drop the slashes and the mode modifier (i), and it should work:

EmailMatch = @"\b([A-Z0-9._%-]+)@([A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,6})\b"

Also, .museum is a valid domain, so {2,6} is a bit better.

The second regex only matches entire strings that consist of nothing but an email address.

I would leave the \b intact.