Regex - Matching a string within an email address

Question

So my problem is I am looking to match a certain combination of letters at the start of an email address followed by an @ and then a wildcard, for example:

admin@* OR noreply@* OR spam@* OR subscribe@

Can this be done?

Try and look at regular-expressions.info read up and practice — Liviu T.
– Liviu T., Commented Dec 9, 2011 at 7:19

stema · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-09 07:04:36Z

1

Try this

^(?:admin|noreply|spam|subscribe)@\S*

See it here on Regexr

You need an anchor at the start to avoid matching address with other characters before. If the string contains only the email address use ^ at the beginning, this matches the start of the string. If the email address is surrounded by other text, the use \b this is a word boundary.

(?:admin|noreply|spam|subscribe) is a non capturing group, becuase of the ?: at the start, then there is a list of alternatives, divided by the | character.

\S* is any amount of non white characters, this will match addresses that are not valid, but should not hurt too much.

answered Dec 9, 2011 at 7:04

stema

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Comments

Neil Essy · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-09 07:15:36Z

1

Your looking for grouping with the | operator. The following will do what you want.

edit: Since your using this for an email server rules you won't need to match the entire string, only part of it. In that case you will need to use ^ to specify the start of the string and then drop the domain portion since we don't care about what it is.

^(admin|noreply|spam|subscribe)@

edited Dec 9, 2011 at 7:15

answered Dec 9, 2011 at 6:39

Neil Essy

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2 Comments

stema Over a year ago

I think your [\w.] is too restrictive, something like \S (a non whitespace character) would be probably better.

Chris Over a year ago

Will this guarantee they will be at the start of the emails address? For instance 'dadmin' or 'emspam' would not be matched? Thanks for your help folks! I'm a bit new to this.

hackartist · Accepted Answer · 2011-12-09 06:39:59Z

0

sure thing!

[A-Za-z]+@.+

says any letters at least once but any number of times, then an at sign, then anything (other than newline) for your specific examples use

(admin|noreply|spam|subscribe)@.+

answered Dec 9, 2011 at 6:39

hackartist

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2 Comments

Chris Over a year ago

Will this guarantee they will be at the start of the emails address? For instance 'dadmin' or 'emspam' would not be matched? Thanks for your help folks! I'm a bit new to this

hackartist Over a year ago

to make sure they are at the start of the email you could use the ^ character at the start if you are just trying to match emails. However if you are trying to search for emails in a long string of text then use \s instead right before. ^ says this has to be the start of the string but \s says this has to be whitespace before the email starts. you can check it out here.

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