Alex Rivera | Logout

Parse email addresses for "from" and "to" fields in Ruby

Asked 2012-08-29T22:10:37.270
13

In an email, it looks like a "from" or "to" field can contain one or more addresses, each address can be like "john@test.com" or "John D Jr <john@test.com>"

So a "from" field can look like any of the following:

"a@a.com"

"a@a.com, Bob Blue <b@b.com>"

"Abe Allen <a@a.com>, b@b.com"

"Abe Allen <a@a.com>, Bob Blue <b@b.com>"

"Abe Allen <a@a.com>, Bob Blue <b@b.com>, c@c.com"

and so on.

I want to parse these fields, extracting each address' email if it's valid, and the name if it's present. Since I'm not familiar with the email standard, I may be missing some cases of what address fields can look like. Is there a Ruby library that can do this?

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1

Assuming your data follows the examples you gave, this should work:

def extract_emails(string)
  string.split(', ').map do |user_string|
    if user_string.include? '<'
      user_string =~ /^([^<]*)<([^>]*)>$/
      {user: $1.strip, email: $2}
    else
      {user: nil, email: user_string}
    end
  end
end

extract_emails "a@a.com"                                          
# => [{:user=>nil, :email=>"a@a.com"}]

extract_emails "a@a.com, Bob Blue <b@b.com>"                      
# => [{:user=>nil, :email=>"a@a.com"}, {:user=>"Bob Blue", :email=>"b@b.com"}]

extract_emails "Abe Allen <a@a.com>, b@b.com"                     
# => [{:user=>"Abe Allen", :email=>"a@a.com"}, {:user=>nil, :email=>"b@b.com"}]

extract_emails "Abe Allen <a@a.com>, Bob Blue <b@b.com>"          
# => [{:user=>"Abe Allen", :email=>"a@a.com"}, {:user=>"Bob Blue", :email=>"b@b.com"}]

extract_emails "Abe Allen <a@a.com>, Bob Blue <b@b.com>, c@c.com" 
# => [{:user=>"Abe Allen", :email=>"a@a.com"}, {:user=>"Bob Blue", :email=>"b@b.com"}, {:user=>nil, :email=>"c@c.com"}]
answered 2012-08-29T22:38:51.183

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