How to get sed to anonymize all e-mail addresses in file

Question

I'm looking for a way to replace all e-mail addresses in a file with [email protected] I guess sed is the right tool for the job, but I'm unable to find the way to do it in a robust and correct way. Thanks.

Answer 1

Here is one crude way of doing that using sed -r:

sed -r 's/^(.*? |)[^@]+@[^ ]+/\[email protected]/g' file

On BSD (eg OSX) use this variant:

sed -E 's/(^|.* )[^@]+@[^ ]+/\[email protected]/g' file

Though keep in mind email addresses can vary a lot these days.

Answer 2

The following worked for me:

sed "s/[^@ ]*@[^@]*\.[^@ ]*/[email protected]/g" file

applied on the following file

[email protected] has an address
so has [email protected]
and finally [email protected] and other stuff

The command C:\Temp>d:sed "s/[^@ ]*@[^@]*\.[^@ ]*/[email protected]/g" file gets me this:

[email protected] has an address
so has [email protected]
and finally [email protected] and other stuff

Answer 3

This obfuscates email-adresses partially:

sed -E 's/[a-zA-Z0-9_][a-zA-Z0-9_][a-zA-Z0-9_][a-zA-Z0-9_]@[a-zA-Z0-9_][a-zA-Z0-9_]/xxxx@xx/g'

I found this easier to develop with. Automated tests can now test for specific email adresses.