Extract email addresses from big file.

[superc0red]

Hey.

I have a big text file with data,
and i want to extract mail addresses.

How i can do it?

[arne]

Hey.

I have a big text file with data,
and i want to extract mail addresses.

How i can do it?

I guess there are plenty of ways to do it. Any constraints on the tool/language?

[superc0red]

perl / shellscript using awk-sed-cut ??

[arne]

perl / shellscript using awk-sed-cut ??

Perl is certainly a reasonable choice, yes. If I had to do it, I would use it.

[Motoma]

Regular expressions would be a great way to do this. Try looking at the sed tool.

[ghostdog74]

awk '
{
  for (i=1;i<=NF;i++) {
       if ( $i ~ /[[:alpha:]]@[[:alpha:]]/ )  { 
	  print $i      
       }
  }
}' "file"

[superc0red]

Thanx for the code dude :)

[prn]

It's been quite a while since I did anything with awk, so I wasn't sure how well ghostdog's code would work. It looked like it should handle only alphabetics with no more than one component on each side of the "@". So I made up a test file (test.txt):

this is a test file foo@bar.com we are looking for moo@drop.dhcp.bar.com email
addresses inside, 00test@leo.bar.com, a text file with no
particular fname.lname@bar.baz.net other par72@take.the.bus.au restrictions
on the format or locations of the 23skidoo@bar.co.uk addresses inside the file.
Let's try one at the end joe27@aol.com.

I ran ghostdog's awk script on this and got the output:

foo@bar.com
moo@drop.dhcp.bar.com
00test@leo.bar.com,
fname.lname@bar.baz.net
23skidoo@bar.co.uk

Note that this output has FIVE email addresses, but the file has SEVEN so there is something wrong. The two that are omitted have digits just beside the "@" so it looks like I was close but not quite right on how much awk would match with this RE. It catches everything between spaces into $i whenever it matches /[[:alpha:]]@[[:alpha:]]/

But note that it also caught the comma following the third address "00test@leo.bar .com," which it should not include in the email address.

Here's a Perl one-liner:
[code=perl]perl -wne'while(/[\w\.]+@[\w\.]+/g){print "$&\n"}' test.txt[/code]
This gives the output

foo@bar.com
moo@drop.dhcp.bar.com
00test@leo.bar.com
fname.lname@bar.baz.net
par72@take.the.bus.au
23skidoo@bar.co.uk
joe27@aol.com.

which is almost correct (and does not include the comma following number 3, although it does include the period at the end).

Here's a corrected version:
[code=perl]perl -wne'while(/[\w\.]+@[\w\.]+\w+/g){print "$&\n"}' test.txt[/code]
This yields

foo@bar.com
moo@drop.dhcp.bar.com
00test@leo.bar.com
fname.lname@bar.baz.net
par72@take.the.bus.au
23skidoo@bar.co.uk
joe27@aol.com

I'm sure ghostdog74's awk script could also easily be fixed, but as I said, it's been a long time and I'm not sure how much I want to play with it. ;)

HTH,
Paul

[peripatetic]

Hi.
Thanks for this. I was using it for a while and thought it was wonderful. However it misses the legitimate hyphen character within emails. Here's an updated version.

perl -wne'while(/[\w\.\-]+@[\w\.\-]+\w+/g){print "$&\n"}' emails.txt | sort -u > output.txt

I also piped it through sort to get a sorted, unique list of emails.

[Motoma]

Hi.
Thanks for this. I was using it for a while and thought it was wonderful. However it misses the legitimate hyphen character within emails. Here's an updated version.

perl -wne'while(/[\w\.\-]+@[\w\.\-]+\w+/g){print "$&\n"}' emails.txt | sort -u > output.txt

I also piped it through sort to get a sorted, unique list of emails.

Great catch peripatetic! Thanks for the addition, and welcome to The Scripts!

[HostQ8i]

guys can this perl script be used on websites ? and i replace the file with a web adress ? or how can i do this to get the emails included in a website ?


and let's say i have www.domain.com/aa.php=1 have some emails saved inside
and www.domain.com/aa.php=2 have also some mails .. how can i make a loop to get all the aa.php=variable and get the mails in all the files ?
thanks in advance and sorry for my english

[David Akpan]

I have a big file with many email addresses, how do i extract only the email address, if posible please include the software i can use

[Freakin]

How would I use a script like this on a group of files that are in a directory to retrieve email addresses from all of them?

[gpraghuram]

How would I use a script like this on a group of files that are in a directory to retrieve email addresses from all of them?

Try to combine the find command with xargs and the perl script given here like this.

find . -name "*.txt" | xargs perl <script given here>


Raghu

[RADEP]

I tried the above example but it didn't work for me.

I got the following error:

C:\Documents and Settings\user\D esktop\abc\trun k\docs>perl -wne'while(/[\w\.\-]+@[\w\.\-]+\w+/g){print "$&\n"}'db_ em
ails.txt | sort -u > output.txt
Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at -e line 1.
-uThe system cannot find the file specified.