regex filter email addresses

sid

ok - heres the deal: for a college assignment we need to write an email spider which collects email addresses out of a text file... so - i just cant get a script to work well enough...

what i have so far is a pretty crappy workaround...


if ($inputString) {
    $n = 0;

$inputString = stripslashes(str_replace("\"", "", str_replace(">", " &gt; ", $inputString)));

$textArray = explode(" ", $inputString);

for ($i = 0; $i < count($textArray); $i++) {
    $token = each($textArray);
    $checkEmail = trim($token[value]);

    $tokenPattern = "^(href=mailto:)";
    if (eregi($tokenPattern, $checkEmail)) {

    $checkEmail = str_replace("href=mailto_:_"_,_"_"_, $checkEmail);
    //the mailto_:_"_,_"_"_ part is supposed to be WITHOUT THE UNDERSCORES
    //this board parses that to a smilie code otherwise...

    if (eregi($emailPattern, $checkEmail)) {
        print "<INPUT TYPE=TEXT VALUE=\"$checkEmail\"><BR>";
        $n++;
    }
}
print "<BR><BR>$n found";
}

it sucks cos it only finds the emails in html files embedded in the mailto:... link structure...

what it SHOULD be able to do is find email addresses that are either between spaces or special characters like :;"<>#' etc.

so if somebody could get me a snippet to replace that id be glad about that...

each time the loop runs through $checkEmail should return a new email and the input text obviously is $inputString.

thanks in advance - sid

ps: no, i am not trying to get into the bulk email business ;-)