Get email addresses from text field regardless of formatting

Question

I have a form with a text field where users can input multiple email addresses. The problem is, these email addresses are formatted in many different ways. For instance:

"Bob Smith" <bob@company.com>, joe@company.com, "John Doe"<john@company.com>

Right now, I separate them using:

emails = params[:invite][:invite_emails].split(', ')
emails.each do |email|
  # send_email
end

How could I get all the emails even though they're formatted differently?

It's probably not a good idea to use a regex for this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/201323/using-a-regular-expression-to-validate-an-email-address?rq=1 — Jérémie B, Mar 03 '16 at 19:51
I misunderstood, you have added the tag "regex", I thought you were looking for a solution with regex ;-) — Jérémie B, Mar 03 '16 at 19:56

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 03 '16 at 21:30

There is no absolute way of parsing emails. But we can try to cover some good grounds:

s = '"Bob Smith" <bob@company.com>, joe@company.com, "John Doe"<john@company.com>'
s.scan(/\w+@\w+\.\w+/)
#=> ["bob@company.com", "joe@company.com", "john@company.com"]

This will cover the gTLDs as well:

s = '"Bob Smith" <bob@company.com>, joe@company.com, "John Doe"<john@company.com> smith@mango.co.uk'
s.scan(/\w+@\w+\.\w+[\.\w]{0,4}/)
#=> ["bob@company.com", "joe@company.com", "john@company.com", "smith@mango.co.uk"]

If you still have other special case, you'll just have to tweak the Regex a bit.

This is great, I didn't know about the scan method. Thanks! – alejorivera Mar 03 '16 at 21:39 — alejorivera, Mar 03 '16 at 21:39

Get email addresses from text field regardless of formatting

1 Answers1