Looking for email address stripping code

[chexonec]

Hiya,

I'm looking for a piece of CF code that strips email addresses from a string. It needs to be smart, so that various patterns can be detected and stripped.

Ex: email@domain.com, email at domain dot com, email@ domain .com, email at domain.com, etc....

Does anybody know if somethng like this already exists?

Thanks.

[sanaullah]

Hi chexonec

Please check UDF if there available http://cflib.org
also read this article, this will help you to extracting emails from a long string.
http://www.bennadel.com/blog/769-Learning-ColdFusion-8-REMatch-For-Regular-Expression-Matching.htm

[tclaremont]

Low liffe, unethical, greedy email address harvesters do this all the time, so I would bet there are a number of tools out there.

The question is, if someone wants to obfuscate their email address in the manner you describe in order to avoid spam bots, why would you want to go against their wishes and attempt to harvest it anyway? If you want an email address, ask them for it. If they want to give it to you, they will.

[chexonec]

Thanks Sanaullah.

tclaremont: because on my site people are not allowed to share contact info. So we remove it from all correspondence and profiles.

[tclaremont]

Ahhh. so you filter the postings to remove their attempt to circumvent the sharing of email addresses? Got it.

All I can say is, good luck to ya. If people want to share that kind of information, they will! Just out of curiosity, why would you even attempt to prevent people from sharing their very own contact information? Note that I am not arguing, rather curious about what valid reason anyone would have for attempting to prevent people from doing what they want with their own information.

What I might suggest is.... Since you probably have their email address on file from when they registered (at least one of their email addresses anyway) you should be able to do an intelligent search for strings that are similar to the email address that you have on file. So, as opposed to starting with *nothing* and looking for things that *might* be an intentionally obfuscated email address, you are least starting with *something*.

[chexonec]

That's a good idea. Thanks!

You're right, there's no way to completely prevent the sharing of email addresses. Ex: jimfoster at the hottest mail place will be hard to catch, without also catching valid text.

The reason? See Yahoo personals, match.com etc... you can find people for free, but if you wanna get in touch with them, you have to pay. We have a similar model.

Thanks for the advice