PHP Email Array Regular Expression

Question

Given a list of emails, formated:

  "FirstName Last" <[email protected]>, "NewFirst NewLast" <[email protected]>

How can I build this into a string array of Only email addresses (I don't need the names).

Answer 1

<?php

 $s = "\"FirstName Last\" <[email protected]>, \"NewFirst NewLast\" <[email protected]>";

 $emails = array();
 foreach (split(",", $s) as $full)
 {
  preg_match("/.*<([^>]+)/", $full, $email);
  $emails[] = $email[1];
 }

 print_r($emails);
?>

Answer 2

You could use preg_match_all (docs):

preg_match_all('/<([^>]+)>/', $s, $matches);
print_r($matches); // inspect the resulting array

Provided that all addresses are enclosed in < ... > there is no need to explode() the string $s.

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EDIT In response to comments, the regex could be rewritten as '/<([^@]+@[^>]+)>/'. Not sure whether this is fail-safe, though :)

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EDIT #2 Use a parser for any non-trivial data (see the comments below - email address parsing is a bitch). Some errors could, however, be prevented by removing duplicate addresses.

Answer 3

PHP’s Mailparse extension has a mailparse_rfc822_parse_addresses function you might want to try. Otherwise you should build your own address parser.