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Python Regular Expressions in Python Introduction to Regular Expressions Email

Keenan Smith
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Keenan Smith
Python Development Techdegree Student 5,487 Points
Posted by Keenan Smith
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree
Keenan Smith
Python Development Techdegree Student 5,487 Points

find_email

I dont know how to limit the expression to just get the 3 emails from the list. I keep getting anything with a @ in front of it.

sets_email.py 
import re

# Example:
# >>> find_email("kenneth.love@teamtreehouse.com, @support, ryan@teamtreehouse.com, test+case@example.co.uk")
# ['kenneth@teamtreehouse.com', 'ryan@teamtreehouse.com', 'test@example.co.uk']

def find_emails(data):
    return (r'[a-zA-Z0-9.-+]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+', data)

1 Answer

Jeff Muday
MOD
Jeff Muday
Treehouse Moderator 28,719 Points
Jeff Muday
Jeff Muday
Treehouse Moderator 28,719 Points

Regex is one of the trickier things to work on. And email recognition/parsing is notorius for being incredibly complex.

You seem to have gotten really close to a solution, let's build on that.

First, your return statement is in the correct configuration, but you will need to use the function re.findall(expr, data)

This gets you solution going!

def find_emails(data):
    return re.findall(r'[a-zA-Z0-9.+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+', data)

We can make it a little more robust by using the \b character to look for BOUNDARIES (e.g. whitespace and commas) between distinct emails.

Here's a reference document: https://www.regular-expressions.info/wordboundaries.html

We can improve it by putting a \b right up front in the expression:

def find_emails(data):
    return re.findall(r'\b[a-zA-Z0-9.+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+', data)