Question

ive got some trouble with writting regex for this lines in exim log

 1. 2011-05-12 11:30:26 1QKRHt-0001aD-Vd => mail <[e-mail]> F=<[e-mail]> bla bla 
 2. 2011-04-22 12:01:31 1QDCF0-0002ss-Nw => /var/mail/mail <[e-mail]> F=<[e-mail]> bla bla 
 3. 2011-05-12 11:29:01 1QKRGU-0001a5-Ok => [e-mail] F=<[e-mail]> bla bla

and i want to put to variable this [e-mail] in one regexp. ive tryed to use logic lile this: find last string before ‘F=’, seperated by whitespaces and can be locked in < >

Can you help me to write this logic?

Answer 1

You can use the following regex:

# the line should be in variable $line
if ($line =~ /.*?\s+<?(\S+?)>?\s+F=/) {
  # ...
}

And then it is a good idea to validate your match with Mail-RFC822-Address perl module, so the full code could be:

use Mail::RFC822::Address qw(valid);

# the line should be in variable $line
if ($line =~ /.*?\s+<?(\S+?)>?\s+F=/) {
  if (valid($1)) {
    # ...
  }
}