I am using this regex to match email addresses in a string.

Everything works fine here: with this regex:

([\w-\.]+)@((?:[\w]+\.)+)([a-zA-Z]{2,4})

But when I am trying to use it with javascript, I am getting only the first email address, not all of them.

Here is my code:

var emailsString = '[email protected] xxxxxxx [email protected]';
var emails = emailsString.match(/([\w-\.]+)@((?:[\w]+\.)+)([a-zA-Z]{2,4})/)[0];

Ad here, I am getting only the first email.

If you can help me, thank you.

I am using this regex to match email addresses in a string.

Everything works fine here: http://regexr.?31e5a with this regex:

([\w-\.]+)@((?:[\w]+\.)+)([a-zA-Z]{2,4})

But when I am trying to use it with javascript, I am getting only the first email address, not all of them.

Here is my code:

var emailsString = '[email protected] xxxxxxx [email protected]';
var emails = emailsString.match(/([\w-\.]+)@((?:[\w]+\.)+)([a-zA-Z]{2,4})/)[0];

Ad here, I am getting only the first email.

If you can help me, thank you.

• javascript
• regex

• 1 Remove '[0]', and you will get an array of matched elements – Engineer Commented Jul 3, 2012 at 14:06
• 1 That is not a suitable regexp for matching email addresses. It will fail .museum, for example. – Alnitak Commented Jul 3, 2012 at 14:07
• Thank yu @Engineer, I allready tryed to do this but then I am getting an arrey of the first email: [email protected],aaaaaaa,bbbb., – Milos Cuculovic Commented Jul 3, 2012 at 14:08
• Thank you @Alnitak, but this is not my problem here. If i will use ([\w-\.]+)@((?:[\w]+\.)+)([a-zA-Z]{2,10}) then it will work, but before carrying about this, I have to rsolve the first issue. – Milos Cuculovic Commented Jul 3, 2012 at 14:11
• @Ana that was just the most obvious error. It will also fail - quoted user parts, international domains, illegal domain names, plenty more... I hear too many horror stories of people who can't signon for various services because of peoples' misconceptions about what makes a "legal" email address. – Alnitak Commented Jul 3, 2012 at 14:17

5 Answers 5

You need to add a 'g' modifier:

var emailsString = '[email protected] xxxxxxx [email protected]';## Heading ##
var emails = emailsString.match(/([\w-\.]+)@((?:[\w]+\.)+)([a-zA-Z]{2,4})/g)

Also, as mentioned elsewhere in this post, your regex does not match all valid emails. Matching valid emails with regex is actually a pretty difficult problem, but to start with, the TLD ponent can be longer than 4 characters so you should adjust that accordingly.

My remendation is to use the other regex mentioned here in bination with the /g modifier to get all matches.

The g modifier is used to perform a global match (find all matches rather than stopping after the first match).

Here is the correct regex for emails according to the RFC 2822 (according to this source):

(?:[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*|"(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21\x23-\x5b\x5d-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])*")@(?:(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?|\[(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?|[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]:(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21-\x5a\x53-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])+)\])

Other than that, remove the [0] and add the /g modifier and you'll get the plete list in an array.

If you want to get all the arrays as a single string, use the following:

var str = arr.join(','); // or whatever delimiter you want to join with

// For example:
['[email protected]', '[email protected]'].join(',') === '[email protected],[email protected]';

Also, as a side note, in a famous Perl module, here is the regex used to really validate email addresses in the From and To fields (not interesting you, but I'd rather have the reference here, so I'm copy pasting):

(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:(?:(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]
)+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:
\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(
?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ 
\t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*@(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\0
31]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\
](?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)(?:\.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+
(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|\[([^\[\]\r\\]|\\.)*\](?:
(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*))*|(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z
|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:\r\n)
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*:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*)?(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+
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Your immediate problem (by your own ments) is that you are using capturing groups in you regex, where you should be using non-capturing ones, or better, none at all:

emailsString = '[email protected] xxxxxxx [email protected]';
emails = emailsString.match(/[\w-\.]+@[\w]+\.+[a-zA-Z]{2,4}/g);
// emails = ["[email protected]", "[email protected]"]

You pattern is close, you just need to use the global flag and not capture the inner parts of each email acount. I hope it helps.

var re = /(?:[\w-\.]+)@(?:(?:[\w]+\.)+)(?:[a-zA-Z]{2,4})/g;
var emailsString = '[email protected] xxxxxxx [email protected]';
var emails = emailsString.match(re); // ["[email protected]", "[email protected]"]

You could simply split the string into single addresses (at whitespace) and apply your regex after that. The performance shouldn't be very different.