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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T17:08:30+00:00

The following python script allows me to scrape email addresses from a given file

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The following python script allows me to scrape email addresses from a given file using regular expressions.

I’m trying to add phone numbers to the regular expression also. I created this regex and seems to work on 7 and 10 digit numbers:

(\d{3}[-\.\s]??\d{3}[-\.\s]??\d{4}|\(\d{3}\)\s*\d{3}[-\.\s]??\d{4}|\d{3}[-\.\s]??\d{4})

Can this just be added to my existing regular expression? I figure I need to edit where I use re.compile but not completely sure how to do this in python. Any help would be appreciated.

# filename variables
filename = 'file.txt'
newfilename = 'result.txt'

# read the file
if os.path.exists(filename):
        data = open(filename,'r')
        bulkemails = data.read()
else:
        print "File not found."
        raise SystemExit

# regex = something@whatever.xxx
r = re.compile(r'(\b[\w.]+@+[\w.]+.+[\w.]\b)')
results = r.findall(bulkemails)
emails = ""
for x in results:
        emails += str(x)+"\n"

# function to write file
def writefile():
        f = open(newfilename, 'w')
        f.write(emails)
        f.close()
        print "File written."

EDIT
When running on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_number
It produces the following output:

2678400
2678400
2678400
2678400
2678400
2678400
2678400
2678400
2678400
8790468
9664261
555-1212
555-9225
555-1212
869-1234
555-5555
555-1212
867-5309
867-5309
867-5309
(267) 867-5309
(212) 736-5000
243-3460
2977743
1000000
2048000
2048000
8790468
9070412
9664261
9664261
9664261
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    For one, I would simplify your regex:

    (?:\(?\b\d{3}\)?[-.\s]*)?\d{3}[-.\s]*\d{4}\b

    will match the same correct numbers as before and have fewer false hits.

    Second, your e-mail regex will miss a lot of valid e-mail addresses and have many false positives, too (it would match aaaa@@@@aaaa, for example). While you can never match e-mail address with 100 % reliability using regex, the following one is better, too:

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

    (Use the case insensitive option when compiling it).

    To restrict yourself to some few TLDs, you can use

    \b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@(?:[A-Z0-9-]+\.)+(?:asia|com|org|net|gov|mil|biz|info|mobi|name|aero|jobs|museum|travel|[A-Z]{2})\b
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