Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Parse Email Addresses with Mail::Address

Mail::Address parses RFC 822-compliant mail addresses of the form:

"Full Name or Phrase" <username@host> (Comment Area)

For example, under RFC 822, an address might be represented as:

"Nathan V. Patwardhan" <[e-mail]> (No Comment)

or:

"Nathan V. Patwardhan" <[e-mail]>

The Mail::Address constructor parses an email address into three parts based on the categories shown above:

$addr = Mail::Address->new("Full Name or Phrase",
                           "username@host",
                           "(Comment Area)");

Mail::Address also outputs portions of the mail address with the functions phrase, address, comment, format, name, host, and user. The phrase, address, and comment functions represent the first, second, and third entities that were passed to the Mail::Address constructor, in which the phrase function:

print $addr->phrase(  );

outputs:

Nathan V. Patwardhan

the address function:

print $addr->address(  );

outputs:

[e-mail]

and the comment function:

print $addr->comment(  );

outputs:

No Comment

A real mail address can be “unmangled,” or parsed from its [e-mail] format, with the user and host functions. The user function removes everything starting with the @ to the end of the address, and host removes everything up to and including the @. Using the previous example of [e-mail], the following line:

print $addr->user;

outputs:

nvp

And the following line using the host function:

print $addr->host;

outputs:

[e-mail]