Can't get my regex to work

[jpr]

Hello, I was hoping to figure this regex out on my own, however I can not seem to make it work. I have a string and I want to grab any email addresses listed in that text. I was tryin to make it look for a @, and then grab everything to the left up to a space, and everything to the right up the a space. Here is what I tried:

preg_match_all("/ .?@.? /i", $myText, $email_matches);
$emails = $email_matches[1];

Can you please show me my error? Thank you!

Jason

[bubblenut]

The problem is your dot, a dot matches one character, you need to match lots of characters one after the other

//in this case it's 4 characters before and 7 after
" [email][e-mail][/email] "
__****@*******_

Also, it's not just any character you want to match, it's any character apart from a space. So, any character of the class [^\s] one or more times (+). And one last thing, I'm assuming you don't really want to match the spaces as well, you just want the email address itself? This means we can take them out (the character class ensures we don't match any spaces).
This gives us

[^\s]+@[^\s]+

Now this is all well and good, it matches emails no problem, however, let's have a look at some other things it would match as well.

1. We're allowing all kinds of messy characters in either part which can't go in.
   "/\n&(@thesite.com

2. we ignore the fact that there is a required form for the second part which the following does not adhere to
   anaddress@notasite
   [/list=a]
   The first problem is easy, we add a couple of extra characters in the character class which we don't want there, this gives us

   [^\s"'\n\&\(\)] 
   

   In fact, it's probaby easier to say what is alowed in the first character class. We are allowed alphanumerics, underscores, hyphens and a couple more which I'll let you find out, this gives us.

   [a-zA-Z0-9_-\.]
   

   Now for the second refinement. The second part of the email address is the domain name, this must end in somthing like .com or .co.uk or .com.hk or .nl. This can be expressed as "At the end of the domain there must be a dot followed by between two and four alphanumerics. This can be followed by the same expression again but does not have to be." So that's .[a-zA-Z0-9]{2,4} (a dot and then between two and four alphanumerics), (.[a-zA-Z0-9]{2,4}){1,2} (either one or two times)

   Putting this all together gives us the following.

   $regex="[a-zA-Z0-9_-\\.]+@[a-zA-Z0-9_-\\.](\\.[a-zA-Z0-9]{2,4}){1,2}";
   preg_match_all("/".$regex."/",$myText,$matches);
   $email=$matches[0];
   

   HTH
   Bubble

[jpr]

Hello, your code seems to do exactly what I need to do, however I encountered the following error:

Warning: Compilation failed: range out of order in character class at offset 13 in /home/jrottman/public_html/test.php on line 11

Any ideas? Thank you for all the help you have been giving me!
Jason

[bubblenut]

I spend ten minutes writing out a detailed explination of how one might think through the contruction of a regular expression and givin you an example at the end and you're not willing to spend a little time debuging it?
The problem is in the character class [a-zA-Z0-9_-.] This character class is used twice, you'll have to make the change in both occurences (one less thing for you to think about :rolleyes: )

Bubble

[jpr]

Hello, is it because you need a "\" to change the metacharacter "-" into a regular allowable character?

Like this:
[a-zA-Z0-9_-.]

That got rid of the erros, however now it does not find the email addresses anymore.....

[bubblenut]

What does the email address and the text either side of it look like?
Cheers
Bubble