Regex Problem

[stephensandison]

Hi

I have a webmail program written in php. However when mail comes in it sometimes has a return-address of:

Joe Bloggs <[e-mail]>

This stops my webmail script from replying correctly. Could someone please tell me how to strip the e-mail address from this. Using regex or any other method.

So I end up with:

[e-mail]

Regards,

Stephen

[cordex]

$str = "Joe Blow <[e-mail]>";
$mail_st=substr($str, (strpos($str, "<")+1), ((strpos($str, ">")-1)-(strpos($str, "<"))));

[Anon]

$email = "Joe Bloggs <[e-mail]>";

$email = preg_replace("/^.*<(.+)>$/", "\1", $email);
-or-
$start = strpos($email, "<") + 1;
$email = substr($email, $start, strlen($email) - $start - 1);

[cordex]

Ahh, but other people think of the nicest way to outdo my code. ProgrammerMan's second tidbit of code is better - use it instead. That is, unless you are concerned about getting an email like: "Joe Bloggs <[e-mail]> Joe". In which case, his code will catch everything but the final char. Still, I don't think that's an issue with what you're doing.

My bit of code run 100,000 times takes 2.6679870039225 seconds.

The preg_replace statement took 3.5569069981575 seconds for 100,000 iterations

And finally, the improved substr() statement took 2.1486829966307 seconds for 100,000 loops.

Conclusion: if you aren't concerned with data past ">", use ProgrammerMan's:
$start = strpos($email, "<") + 1;
$email = substr($email, $start, strlen($email) - $start - 1);

Cheers.

[stephensandison]

Hi Ben,

I used the first piece of code you posted:

$mail_st=substr($mail_to, (strpos($mail_to, "<")+1), ((strpos($mail_to, ">")-1)-(strpos($mail_to, "<"))));

However when I input a strng of:

$mail_to = "SheerSite Client Services <[e-mail]>";

I get this output:

heerSite Client Services <[e-mail]>

Do you know why this happens and how I can still achieve stripping just the e-mail address.

Thanks for all your help,

Stephen

[cordex]

I copied and pasted the code you just referenced and added one echo statement:

$mail_to = "SheerSite Client Services <[e-mail]>";
$mail_st=substr($mail_to, (strpos($mail_to, "<")+1), ((strpos($mail_to,">")-1)-(strpos($mail_to, "<"))));
echo $mail_st . "<BR>";

and it returned [e-mail] on my server with no problems.

I'm running PHP 4.0.6 on win2000. I don't think I used any php4.0.6 proprietary functions or anything, though. Try this:

$mail_to = "SheerSite Client Services <[e-mail]>";
echo "Cut $mail_to <BR>";
echo "From offset ".(strpos($mail_to, "<")+1). "<BR>";
echo "For ". ((strpos($mail_to,">")-1)-(strpos($mail_to, "<"))) . " Characters <BR>";

See what it returns.