Question

If there is one that could handle this, what would be the correct regex pattern to extract email addresses from a string coming from an email form “To” line, that allows the addresses to be delimited by commas “,”, semicolons “;”, spaces, or any combination of the three. The regex also has to be able to ignore “noise” text, such as if an address is enclosed in “<” and “>” characters, or has an actual name next to the email address. For example, from this string that was in the To field:

"Joe Smith" <[e-mail]>, [e-mail]; [e-mail] [e-mail]

The pattern should be able to return the following matches of:
jsmith@example, [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail]

I am using PHP, so if this can’t be done in single regex then im definitely open to other PHP-based solutions.

Thanks

Answer 1

Try

\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@(?:[A-Z0-9-]+\.)+[A-Z]{2,6}\b

(courtesy of RegexBuddy) as in

preg_match_all('/\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@(?:[A-Z0-9-]+\.)+[A-Z]{2,6}\b/i', $subject, $result, PREG_PATTERN_ORDER);
$result = $result[0];

Note the /i modifier to make it case-insensitive.

See also this question for an explanation of the drawbacks of regexes for finding e-mail addresses in a string.