If your re demands get more complicated, you could take a look at pyparsing. The code is a bit more verbose, but many find it easier to compose their expressions using pyparsing's classes, such as Literal, OneOrMore, Optional, etc., plus a number of built-in helper functions and expressions, including delimitedList, quotedString, and cStyleComment. Pyparsing is intended for writing recursive-descent parsers, but can also be used (and is best learned) with simple applications such as this one.
Here is a simple script for parsing your e-mail addresses. Note the use of results names to give you access to the individual parsed fields (re's also support a similar capability). Download pyparsing at http://pyparsing.sourceforge.net. -- Paul from pyparsing import Literal,Word,Optional,\ delimitedList,alphanums # define format of an email address AT = Literal("@").suppress() emailWord = Word(alphanums+"_") emailDomain = delimitedList( emailWord, ".", combine=True) emailAddress = emailWord.setResultsName("user") + \ Optional( AT + emailDomain ).setResultsName("host") # parse each word in wordList wordList = ['myname1', '[EMAIL PROTECTED]', '[EMAIL PROTECTED]', '[EMAIL PROTECTED]', '[EMAIL PROTECTED]'] for w in wordList: addr = emailAddress.parseString(w) print w print addr print "user:", addr.user print "host:", addr.host print Will print out: myname1 ['myname1'] user: myname1 host: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ['myname1', 'domain.tld'] user: myname1 host: domain.tld [EMAIL PROTECTED] ['myname2', 'domain.tld'] user: myname2 host: domain.tld [EMAIL PROTECTED] ['myname4', 'domain'] user: myname4 host: domain [EMAIL PROTECTED] ['myname5', 'domain.tldx'] user: myname5 host: domain.tldx -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
