NAME
Email::Find - Find RFC 822 email addresses in plain text
SYNOPSIS
use Email::Find;
$num_found = find_emails($text, \&callback);
DESCRIPTION
This is a module for finding a *subset* of RFC 822 email addresses in
arbitrary text (the CAVEATS manpage). The addresses it finds are not
guaranteed to exist or even actually be email addresses at all (the
CAVEATS manpage), but they will be valid RFC 822 syntax.
Email::Find will perform some heuristics to avoid some of the more
obvious red herrings and false addresses, but there's only so much which
can be done without a human.
Functions
Email::Find exports one function, find_emails(). It works very similar
to URI::Find's find_uris().
$num_emails_found = find_emails($text, \&callback);
The first argument is a block of text for find_emails to search through
and manipulate. Second is a callback routine which defines what to do
with each email as they're found. It returns the total number of emails
found.
The callback is given two arguments. The first is a Mail::Address object
representing the address found. The second is the actual original email
as found in the text. Whatever the callback returns will replace the
original text.
EXAMPLES
# Simply print out all the addresses found leaving the text undisturbed.
find_emails($text, sub {
my($email, $orig_email) = @_;
print "Found ".$email->format."\n";
return $orig_email;
});
# For each email found, ping its host to see if its alive.
require Net::Ping;
$ping = Net::Ping->new;
my %Pinged = ();
find_emails($text, sub {
my($email, $orig_email) = @_;
my $host = $email->host;
next if exists $Pinged{$host};
$Pinged{$host} = $ping->ping($host);
});
while( my($host, $up) = each %Pinged ) {
print "$host is ". $up ? 'up' : 'down' ."\n";
}
# Count how many addresses are found.
print "Found ", find_emails($text, sub { return $_[1] }), " addresses\n";
# Wrap each address in an HTML mailto link.
find_emails($text, sub {
my($email, $orig_email) = @_;
my($address) = $email->format;
return qq|<a href="mailto:$address">$orig_email</a>|;
});
CAVEATS
Why a subset of RFC 822?
I say that this module finds a *subset* of RFC 822 because if I
attempted to look for *all* possible valid RFC 822 addresses I'd
wind up practically matching the entire block of text! The complete
specification is so wide open that its difficult to construct
soemthing that's *not* an RFC 822 address.
To keep myself sane, I look for the 'address spec' or 'global
address' part of an RFC 822 address. This is the part which most
people consider to be an email address (the '
[email protected]' part) and
it is also the part which contains the information necessary for
delivery.
Why are some of the matches not email addresses?
Alas, many things which aren't email addresses *look* like email
addresses and parse just fine as them. The biggest headache is email
and usenet and email message IDs. I do my best to avoid them, but
there's only so much cleverness you can pack into one library.
AUTHORS
Copyright 2000, 2001 Michael G Schwern <
[email protected]>. All rights
reserved.
Current maintainer is Tatsuhiko Miyagawa <
[email protected]>.
THANKS
Schwern thanks to Jeremy Howard for his patch to make it work under
5.005.
LICENSE
This module is free software; you may redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.
The author STRONGLY SUGGESTS that this module not be used for the
purposes of sending unsolicited email (ie. spamming) in any way, shape
or form or for the purposes of generating lists for commercial sale.
If you use this module for spamming I reserve the right to make fun of
you.
SEE ALSO
the Email::Valid manpage, RFC 822, the URI::Find manpage, the
Apache::AntiSpam manpage
