JavaScript, regex: How to fetch mail address in mailto: links

Question

Is there a jquery plugin or may be a regex which can be used to all the fields in query string of a mailto: link. It should support the mailto syntax.

Say if I have a link like ...

<a href="mailto:[email protected],[email protected]">Some msg</a>

The regex should give me the mail addresses in mailto: link - [email protected], [email protected]. It should also support links like

<a href="mailto:[email protected]?subject=Comments from MailTo Syntax Page">
<a href="mailto:[email protected]?body=I am having trouble finding information on">
<a href="mailto:[email protected]?subject=MailTo Comments&[email protected]&[email protected]">

For a link like

<a href="mailto:value">tell a friend</a>

I would pass value and the function and get an associative array of email addresses and other fields passed in query string.

Domenic · Accepted Answer · 2013-06-17 16:39:16Z

4

Parsing URLs, and especially their query strings, is not a job for regexes. You could use a proper URL-parsing library or perhaps just a query string parsing one.

edited Jun 17, 2013 at 16:39

answered Mar 5, 2012 at 1:44

Domenic

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2 Comments

Petah Over a year ago

Really? hundreds of lines of code to pull out an email address?

Domenic Over a year ago

Yes. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't understand the full complexity of URLs.

inhan · Accepted Answer · 2012-03-05 02:36:39Z

1

I'm not sure how accurate this is, but it might be improved if you feel a necessity to use regex.

function getEmails(str) {
// returns a list of email addresses in 'str'
    var tags = str.match(/<a href=('|")mailto:(.*?)\1(.*?)>/gi);
    var res = [];
    if (!tags.length) return res;
    for (var i = 0; i < tags.length; i++) {
        tags[i] = tags[i].replace(/^<a href=('|")mailto:(.+?)(\?[^\1]*)?\1>$/,'$2');
        var arr = tags[i].replace(/\s/g,'').split(',');
        for (var j = 0; j < arr.length; j++) res.push(arr[j]);
    }
    return res;
}

I'm not sure what you mean in the last part by the way so I tried to answer the first part.

answered Mar 5, 2012 at 2:36

inhan

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1 Comment

Claytronicon Over a year ago

I don't know if this satisfies the OP's needs, but this does exactly what I was after. Thanks! (Also thanks for not posting a "don't do this" answer :)

Liam Hammett · Accepted Answer · 2018-08-07 16:53:52Z

0

If you know what you are doing :

var href = 'mailto:[email protected]?subject=My+Subject&body=My+Body';

function getMailto(s) {
    var r = {};
    var email = s.match(/mailto:([^\?]*)/);
            email = email[1] ? email[1] : false;
  var subject = s.match(/subject=([^&]+)/);
            subject = subject ? subject[1].replace(/\+/g,' ') : false;
    var body = s.match(/body=([^&]+)/);
            body = body ? body[1].replace(/\+/g,' ') : false;

  if(email) {r['email'] = email;}
  if(subject) {r['subject'] = subject;}
  if(body) {r['body'] = body;}

  return r;
}

console.log(getMailto(href));

Demo : https://jsfiddle.net/l2aelba/qov9wpk5/

edited Aug 7, 2018 at 16:53

Liam Hammett

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answered Jan 14, 2016 at 10:53

l2aelba

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3 Comments

Claytronicon Over a year ago

+1 for adding a solution rather than saying you shouldn't do it! , although the method name in the console.log in inconsistent, and needs to be stringified.

Anko Over a year ago

-1 This parsing is completely insufficient for URL decoding in general. For example, if the subject contains an exclamation mark, it will have been encoded as %21, which your code would leave as-is.

l2aelba Over a year ago

@Anko This is just "use on your own risk!"

toddmo · Accepted Answer · 2022-11-14 23:47:38Z

0

This works for me.

function parseMailTo(mailto) {
  var url = new URL(mailto)
  var query = parseQuery(url.search)
  return {
    to: {url.pathname}
    subject: {query.subject}
  }
}

function parseQuery(queryString) {
  var query = {};
  var pairs = (queryString[0] === '?' ? queryString.substr(1) : queryString).split('&');
  for (var i = 0; i < pairs.length; i++) {
      var pair = pairs[i].split('=');
      query[decodeURIComponent(pair[0])] = decodeURIComponent(pair[1] || '');
  }
  return query;
}

answered Nov 14, 2022 at 23:47

toddmo

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