Question

I have a form field that contains one , or several “Complete” email addresses. By “Complete” I mean in the format Personal Name <[e-mail]>

Multiple “complete” email address are separated by a semi-colon. There may or may not be a final semi-colon at the end of the list. I want to extract the Names into one field and the email addresses into another field.

so :

full_email = "Person name <[e-mail]> ; Another person <[e-mail]> ; " 
email_only is set to  "[e-mail] ; [e-mail] ;" 
name_only is set to  "Person name ; Another person ;"

Is there some reg exp / jQuery bit of genius to copy everything between the < and > into a second field and everything before the < into a third field and do it iteratively/recursively for the whole list of “complete” email addresses to produce two semi-colon separated lists of just pure email address and just pure names?

Answer 1

I think you can do this without regex or jQuery by simply splitting on ; to get the entries, then on < to get the parts of the entry. Here’s a jsFiddle to demonstrate.

var full_email = "Person name <[e-mail]> ; Another person <[e-mail]> ; " ;

var email_only = [];
var name_only = [];

var entries = full_email.split(';');

for(var i = 0; i < entries.length; i++)
{
    var entry = entries[i];
    if (entry.contains('<')){
        var parts = entry.split('<');

        name_only.push(parts[0].trim());
        email_only.push(parts[1].substr(0, parts[1].indexOf('>')));
    }
}

// The arrays
console.log(email_only);
console.log(name_only);

// Joined back to ; separated strings
console.log(email_only.join('; '));
console.log(name_only.join('; '));