Question

I have the following example tweet:

RT @user1: who are @thing and @user2? 

I only want to have user1, thing and user2.

What regular expression can I use to extract those three names?

PS: A username must only contain letters, numbers and underscores.

Answer 1

Tested:

/@([a-z0-9_]+)/i 

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In Ruby (irb):

>> 'RT @user1: who are @thing and @user2?'.scan(/@([a-z0-9_]+)/i) => [['user1'], ['thing'], ['user2']] 

In Python:

>>> import re >>> re.findall('@([a-z0-9_]+)', 'RT @user1: who are @thing and @user2?', re.I) ['user1', 'thing', 'user2'] 

In PHP:

<?PHP $matches = array(); preg_match_all(     '/@([a-z0-9_]+)/i',     'RT @user1: who are @thing and @user2?',     $matches);  print_r($matches[1]); ?>  Array (     [0] => user1     [1] => thing     [2] => user2 )