Simple - using String#scan to extract an email address

Question

I've got a string that contains:

@from = "John Doe <[email protected]>"

When I do:

@from.scan('/\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b/i')

I get no results. I'm trying to extract the email address on it's own.

I tried removing the \b's but this did not work either.

Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

Sorry, I don't have enough rep to comment, so I'll make this an answer:

For any future use, everyone should make one modification: Don't restrict the TLD length to 4. New TLDs are being introduced very rapidly, you should now use a regex like this:

@from.scan(/\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,}\b/i)

All I did was remove the 4 at the end of the regex, which places a maximum length of 4 characters on the TLD. TLDs used to almost all be 2, 3, or 4 characters long (.com, .org, .info, etc.). But now, they are introducing tons of new ones (.auction, .software, .business, etc.)

So nobody should restrict TLD length anymore (although leaving a minimum of 2 chars is still good).

Answer 2

Your expression works fine: rubular

The problem is the quotes around your regular expression means that it is interpreted as a plain text string rather than a regular expression. Removing the quotes solves the problem: ideone

@from = "John Doe <[email protected]>"
@from.scan(/\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b/i) { |x| puts x } 

Output:

[email protected]