Re: regular expression

* Thus wrote Robert Kornfeld (aon.912628966@aon.at): > hey, professionals out there: > > i need to write a parser for an email-header to retrieve the email of the > 'To:'-field. > there are 2 possibilities: > 'To: foo@foo.com' or > 'To: first foo <foo@foo.com>' Actually the second one needs to be "first foo" <foo@foo.com> - or - foo <foo@foo.com> so you need something like: /([^<]*<([^>]+)>|(.*))/ That will parse one address. if you have more than one address you'll have to break the address list apart sperated by ';' ie. To: email@ddress.com; "foo bar" <another@t.com> $emails = explode(';', $email_list); and to get that email address list you'll have to take into account folding ie. To: address; address2@ domain.com So to allow for this while reading the header lines: $last_field = ''; foreach($headerline) { // detect a folded header line if ($headerline{1} == ' ' || $headerline{1} == "\t" ) { $headers[$last_field] .= trim($headerline); continue; } // check for end of headers if ($headerline{1} == "\n") { break;// we're done with headers. } //now split the field list($field, $data) = explode(':', $headerline, 2); // ensure name is consistent ok $field = strtolower($field); // save the data $headers[$field] = $data; // incase its folded $last_field = $field; } Now apply the other two methods to $headers['to']; that was a little more than a regex, but I hope it helps. Curt -- "I used to think I was indecisive, but now I'm not so sure."