Extracting email addresses from any text file with Python

Tuomas Rasila — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 09:05:48 +0000

Ok, this might sound like that we are in the spamming business now. Well, we are not. The case is that email address is typically the only per-person unique key in CRM data. These couple of lines of Python will extract email addresses from any text file, e.g a HTML-file. This script will also make list unique so if the same email address is listed many times in the original data, it will be only once in the output. Enjoy:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# coding: utf-8

import os
import re
import sys

def grab_email(file):
    """Try and grab all emails addresses found within a given file."""
    email_pattern = re.compile(r'\b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b',
                               re.IGNORECASE)
    found = set()
    if os.path.isfile(file):
        for line in open(file, 'r'):
            found.update(email_pattern.findall(line))
    for email_address in found:
        print email_address

if __name__ == '__main__':
    grab_email(sys.argv[1])

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Extracting email addresses from any text file with Python