Email Validation / Reg Exp question

[Cheers]

Hi there,

I'm pretty new to regular expressions and haven't completely learnt the ropes yet. So, I'm stuck with a small problem.

I need to detect a valid email address within a passage of text and censor it.

All of the examples of regular expressions I have found that relate to email addresses check the validity of an email address and presumably I need to use this as a foundation.

However, my expressions arent working and detection is failing because (I think) there exists text both to the left and to the right of any embedded email address (within my passage of text).

Can anyone help with a regular expression that is able to detect an email address within a passage of text, rather than a straight forward email validation.

Thanks for any help in advance.

Gary

Code that needs modifying:

$message = "i want to replace [e-mail] and censor it";
$replace = "[email address censored]";

$message = ereg_replace("^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)+$", $replace, $message);

echo $message;

[Kudose]

<?php
//dont use this yet...
//posting this until I can get to a
//computer to test in a sec

$censor = "[email address censored]";
$search = "#^{[-_A-Za-z0-9.} ]+@[-A-Za-z0-9 ]+.[A-Za-z.!,; ]+$#";
$message = "This is Travis. My email address is [e-mail]! Mail me sometime.";
$censored = preg_replace($search, $censor, $message);
echo $censored;
?>

[Darth_Vedor]

Reg Experesion is a cool subject, try the php manual for a complete description, I have given a genereal function you can use to validate e-mail, it works, it's the one i use.

///////////////////////////////////////////////////// fundtion starts here//////////////////////////
function isEmail($mEmail,$mRequired)
{
// This function will check the e-mail is valid or not
// $mEmal - the e-mail address that we must check
// $mRequired - a flag that determins wether the e-mail is required or not
// $mRequired = 1 : E-Mail is mandotery
// $mRequired = 0 : E-mail is not Mandotery

if($mRequired == 1)
{
	if(empty($mEmail) || !ereg("[0-9a-z]([-_.]?[0-9a-z])*@[0-9a-z]([-.]?[0-9a-z])*\\.[a-z]", $mEmail))
	{
		return false;
	}
	else
	{
		return true;
	}
}
else if($mRequired == 0)
{
	if(empty($mEmail))
		return true;
	else
	{
		if(!ereg("[0-9a-z]([-_.]?[0-9a-z])*@[0-9a-z]([-.]?[0-9a-z])*\\.[a-z]", $mEmail))
		{
			return false;
		}
		else
		{
			return true;
		}
	}
}

}
////////////////////////////////////////// funtion ends here////////////////////////////////

hope this will help you, it'll return true if the e-mail is valid, false otherwise,
you must pass the string you want to validate and $mRequired,
$mRequired, carry 2 values, 0,1
pass 0 : if your web form says that e-mail is not a required field
pass 1: if your web form says that e-mail is a required field

Good Luck.

[Cheers]

Thanks but unfortunately not what I'm looking for....

I already know how to validate an email address.

The question posed relates to the censoring of an email address within a body of text.

I need to modify the regular expression to replace the email address (within the body of text) with some other text.

Gary

[Darth_Vedor]

Ok, sorry about that, i think this will solve your problem then
try this,

<?php
$mString ="i want to replace [e-mail] and censor it and i want to sensor this too [e-mail] ok guess this works";
$mCensor = "[E-Mail Censored]";
$mMessage = ereg_replace("0-9a-z@0-9a-z\.[a-z]*",$mCensor,$mString);
echo $mString."<br/>".$mMessage;
?>

[Cheers]

Perfect!

Thanks very much!

😃