Searching for email address

[Peter Hansen]

Graeme Longman wrote:
> "Charl P. Botha" wrote:
> > In article <mailman.1028038004.25205.python-list at python.org>,
> > Graeme Longman wrote:
> > > I'm writing some code which searches html for email addresses. Does
> > > anyone out there have a good regular expression syntax for searching for
> > > the email string, I'm sure this must've been done a few times before.
> >
> > Excuse my curiosity, but what are you going to do with this code? :)
> 
> In the process of translating our client's sites.
> 
> Just a script to find all the email addresses so that the email addresses
> aren't included for translation.

Are there really going to be any addresses that don't follow the 
format user at host.domain on those web pages?  

With real email (i.e. RFC822 and later ones) there are many options 
including parentheses and quotation marks in addresses, but I've never 
yet seen such a thing in a simple "mailto:" URL on the web.  

Maybe you're trying to find a sledgehammer when a flyswatter will do...

-Peter