Obscure email addresses in a sentence

Question

I am outputting log messages and need to obscure the email addresses in them.

A log message might look like this:

A lead was saved for sharon.davis@example.com, Date: 11th December 2019, Service: Car Hire ( Premium ), Extras: NA, Price: £300

I am using:

preg_replace('/(?<=.).(?=.*?@)|(?<=@.).*(?=\.com)/u', '*', $email);

I am using this regex to obscure emails, which works great when it's just an email, but in a sentence, it does this....

A********************************@example.com, Date: 11th December 2019, Service: Car Hire ( Premium ), Extras: NA, Price: £300

Is there a way to only make it go back as far as the space?

So the required result would be:

A lead was saved for ************@example.com, Date: 11th December 2019, Service: Car Hire ( Premium ), Extras: NA, Price: £300",

note that a mail address doesn't necessary end with `.com` and **there may be spaces** in a mail address. `this."is a valid".address@mail` — Cid, Dec 12 '19 at 14:19
ok thanks, I didnt know emails could have spaces. ill rethink it. — Collins, Dec 12 '19 at 14:20
How are the logs generated ? Is the content added dynamically with variables, such as mail, date, service, extra, and so on? — Cid, Dec 12 '19 at 14:22
I only have access to the plain text string, not the function that creates them — Collins, Dec 12 '19 at 14:23
this answer could help you => https://stackoverflow.com/a/3345749/12490771 — Denis METRAL, Dec 12 '19 at 14:26

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 05 '21 at 13:14

If the objective is to obscure/obfuscate email addresses, then don't let anyone know how many characters are being converted to asterisks.

Match the substrings before the @ and replace them with a static number of asterisks.

Code: (Demo)

$string = 'A lead was space" ema il "@emailadds.com saved for sharon.davis@website.com, Date: 11th December 2019, Service: Car Hire ( Premium ), Extras: NA, Price: £300';

echo preg_replace('/(?:[^"\s@]+|"[^"]*")+(?=@[^\s.]+\.)/', '******', $string);

Output:

A lead was ******@emailadds.com saved for ******@website.com, Date: 11th December 2019, Service: Car Hire ( Premium ), Extras: NA, Price: £300

Obscure email addresses in a sentence

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