Regex for extracing multiple email addresses in PHP

Question

I'm receiving content such as:

"Jane Doe" <jane@doe.com>, "John Doe" <john@doe.com>

And I would like to extract the email addresses:

jane@doe.com, john@doe.com

Currently I have a regex like this:

/<(.*)>/

Which gets everything in between brackets, but it also gets things like:

jane@doe.com>, "John Doe" <john@doe.com

When I used an @ sign in the middle, it also didn't work quite right:

/<(.*)@(.*)>/

I could explode() based on the comma, but I'm thinking there ought to be a way for preg_match() to give me what I want. What am I missing in my regex?

Answer 1

Your regexp is too greedy. Use /<(.*?)>/ instead, or better even something like

/<([^<>]+@[^<>]+)>/

Answer 2

I use this for matching emails, I know there are other expressions out there in the wild that may catch more email address but I find this one quick to type and so far suits all my needs, feel free to give it a try:

/\w+[\.\w]+@\w+[\.\w]+/

You may want to use this with preg_match_all to capture all the addresses

for example:

$string = '"Jane Doe" <jane@doe.com>, "John Doe" <john@doe.com>';
preg_match_all('/\w+[\.\w]+@\w+[\.\w]+/', $string, $matches);
print_r($matches);

Answer 3

Easiest way is to match everything except the final delimeter:

/<([^>]*)>/

Answer 4

You are including too much with the dot. Try this:

/<([^>]*)>/