Question

In Python, I am extracting emails from a string like so:

split = re.split(" ", string)
emails = []

pattern = re.compile("^[a-zA-Z0-9_\.-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+.[a-zA-Z0-9-\.]+$");

for bit in split:
    result = pattern.match(bit)

    if(result != None):
        emails.append(bit)

And this works, as long as there is a space in between the emails. But this might not always be the case. For example:

Hello, [e-mail]

would return:

[e-mail]

but, take the following string:

I know my best friend mailto:[e-mail]!

This would return null. So the question is: how can I make it so that a regex is the delimiter to split? I would want to get

[e-mail]

in all cases, regardless of punctuation next to it. Is this possible in Python?

By "splitting by regex" I mean that if the program encounters the pattern in a string, it will extract that part and put it into a list.

Answer 1

I’d say you’re looking for re.findall:

>>> email_reg = re.compile(r'[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+')
>>> email_reg.findall('I know my best friend mailto:[e-mail]!')
['[e-mail]']

Notice that findall can handle more than one email address:

>>> email_reg.findall('Text text [e-mail], text text, [e-mail]!')
['[e-mail]', '[e-mail]']