Question

I am going through our old site files and data that has our members emails and correspondence for 10 years.

I am extracting all of the email addresses (and botched email entries) and adding them to our new sites db.

It was a beginner attempt cms and had no error checking and validation.

So, I am having trouble matching emails with spaces and double @.

jam @ spa ces1.com

jam@spac es2.com

jam@@doubleats.org

I have constructed this loose regex that intentionally allows for a whole bunch of incorrect email formats but, the above three are examples of ones I can’t figure out.

Here is my current “working” code:

$pattern1= '([\s]*)([_a-zA-Z0-9-]+(\.[_a-zA-Z0-9-]+)*([ ]+|)@([ ]+|)([a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.)+([a-zA-Z]{2,}))([\s]*)';
$pattern2='\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b';
$pattern="/$pattern1|$pattern2/i";
$isago = preg_match_all($pattern,$text,$matches);
    if ($isago) {.......

I need another pattern that would allow the three email examples above to be recognized as email addresses. (actual validation comes later)

Also, is there is any other patterns I could use that would allow me to recognize possible emails in the files?

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

For the third case you can change your @ to @{1,2}.
For the first and second you can add a space in your regex pattern1:

$pattern1= '([\s]*)([_a-zA-Z0-9-]+(\.[_a-zA-Z0-9-]+)*([ ]+|)@{1,2}([ ]+|)([ a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.)+([a-zA-Z]{2,}))([\s]*)';
$pattern2='\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@{1,2}[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b';