Parsing a free-rorm field looking for an email address

[Fairlight]

>From inside the gravity well of a singularity, Mike Schwartz (PC Support & Services, Appleton, WI) shouted:
>      Does anybody have a routine that parses a free-form line looking for
> an email address in it?  I thought somebody posted a routine that did
> this a while ago.

Nothing handy here, but it could be done relatively quickly by just about
anyone--depending on how you're determining "email address".

If you mean simply the "user@[some.]domain.TLD" format, sure, that's
relatively easy to write.

If you want full RFC-822 compliance, that's going to take a bit to write,
recognising bangpaths, user%host at host pathing, and any of the other myriad
address formats out there.

Personally, even I only use the simple format for validation.  There's a
perl module that would let me validate for RFC-822 compliance, but I never
use it, as I consider it overkill.  When even UUCP hosts started going to
domain syntax, that's when I stopped really bothering to look at anything
else.

But again--one technically probably -should-.  Even me.  I just don't.  :)
But I'd hate for you to want 822 compliance and only be given a simple
match routine that catches the common form.

mark->