Question

Given a string, how can I match all e-mails thar are inside “< >”.

For example:

I can have [e-mail] and <[e-mail]> and I only want to match the [e-mail].

Thanks!

Answer 1

To be really thorough you could implement a regex from RFC822, which describes valid email address formats, however, you could save time and headache by doing something quick and simple like this:

var extractEmailAddress = function(s) {
  var r=/<?(\S+@[^\s>]+)>?/, m=(""+s).match(r);
  return (m) ? m[1] : undefined;
};
extractEmailAddress('[e-mail]'); // => "[e-mail]"
extractEmailAddress('<[e-mail]>'); // => "[e-mail]"

Of course, this function will be very permissive of strings that might conceivably even remotely look like an email address, so the regular expression “r” could be improved if quality is a concern.