Extract email addresses from text

Hello everyone!

Does anyone have a script (or know how to create one) that extracts email addresses from a text string?

(With similar function as this website: http://www.procato.com/mailextract/)

Thanks in advance! Gustav

[Steven Lord]

It's likely more complicated than you think. See for example this Microsoft blog and this Stack Overflow question. One of the answers on the Stack Overflow page links to a (five year old) page giving a regular expression that I suspect you could use with the regular expression functionality in MATLAB.

Answer 1

[Stephen23]

Take MATLAB's own Regular Expressions example:

email = '[a-z_]+@[a-z]+\.(com|net)';

and adapt it to allow any domain, or whatever other requirements you have:

rgx = '[a-z0-9_]+@[a-z0-9]+(\.[a-z0-9]+)+';
C = regexpi(txt,rgx,'match');

For a slightly stricter version, you can find many regular expressions on the internet, e.g.:

rgx = '[a-z0-9._%+-]+@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)+'

While this simple regular expression works for simple email adresses, it is worth noting that the complete rules for checking valid email adresses are not trivial to implement with a regular expression:

http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html

https://www.emailregex.com

A common mistake (including by this answer) is to exclude non-latin characters.

[Gustav Essunger]

Thank you very much!!

[Adam Danz]

Don't forget Mailojis! 😁

Answer 2

[oliver]

I think the above examples will miss quite a lot of emails, like all those containing a capital letter or things like: Peter.O'[e-mail]. So my suggestion would be something like:

reg='[a-zA-Z0-9._%''+-]+@([a-zA-Z0-9._-])+\.([a-zA-Z]{2,4})';

Although with the wide variety of new TLDs nowadays, limiting the last character group to 2-4 letters may be obsolete (depending on your needs).

[Daniele Lupo]

This regexp validates an invalid mail with consecutive dots, like "my.email@email...com".