[SOLVED] very simple eregi issue

[rckehoe]

I have a very simple issue that I cannot figure out, I really suck at regular expressions...

 

I have a bit of text formatted like so: First Last Name <Email@TheirEmail.com>

 

I want to extract the Email Address from the < and >, how is this done? I am using this code, but obviously it is wrong!

 

$SearchEmail = eregi("[<(.)>]", $r, $regs);

[Maq]

To extract the WHOLE string in between the tags you can use:

 

[]

[premiso]

I would avoid using eregi as it is depreciated in PHP6.

 

Use preg_match instead.

 

$string = "First Last Name <Email@TheirEmail.com>";
preg_match("~<(.*?)>~i", $string, $match);
echo $match[1];

 

Outputs:

Email@TheirEmail.com

[rckehoe]

When I outpint the $regs, all it outputs is a < ... It doesn't pull the email address.

[rckehoe]

Ok.. the preg_match worked... thanks!

[nrg_alpha]

[<(.+)>]

 

Post #11 and 14 from this thread provide a caveat to using .+ (or even .*, same principal). If <Email@TheirEmail.com> is the complete string in itself, then it's not a big deal at all to use greedy quantifiers..(in fact, would be even preferable to do so, as backtracking would be minimal) but if this is all nested in a larger body of text, it would be wise to avoid such greedy quantifiers and use lazy quantifiers instead.

 

$string = "First Last Name <Email@TheirEmail.com>";

preg_match("~<(.*?)>~i", $string, $match);

 

Just to note that in this case, the i modifier isn't necessary, as the dot match all will match anything (including upper / lowercase alpha characters) other than a newline (that is, in the absence of the s modifier).

 

Another alternative to lazy quantifiers include the use of a negated character class such as:

~<([^>]+)>~