Parse a comma separated list of emails in Python which are of the format “Name” <email>

Question

Input (comma separated list):

"\"Mr ABC\" <mr@abc.com>, \"Foo, Bar\" <foo@bar.com>, mr@xyz.com"

Expected output (list of 2-tuples):

[("Mr ABC", "mr@abc.com"), ("Foo, Bar", "foo@bar.com"), ("", "mr@xyz.com")]

I could actually use comma splitting and then use email.utils.parseaddr(address) until I realized that the name part can also have comma in it, like in "Foo, Bar" above.

email.utils.getaddresses(fieldvalues) is very close to what I need but it accepts a sequence, not a comma separated string.

Answer 1

You may use the following

import re
p = re.compile(r'"([^"]+)"(?:\s+<([^<>]+)>)?')
test_str = '"Mr ABC" <mr@abc.com>, "Foo, Bar" <foo@bar.com>, "mr@xyz.com"'
print(re.findall(p, test_str))

Output: [('Mr ABC', 'mr@abc.com'), ('Foo, Bar', 'foo@bar.com'), ('mr@xyz.com', '')]

See IDEONE demo

The regex matches...

• " - a double quote
• ([^"]+) - (Group 1) 1 or more characters other than a double quote
• " - a double quote

Then, an optional non-capturing group is introduced with (?:...)? construct: (?:\\s+<([^<>]+)>)? . It matches...

• \\s+ - 1 or more whitespace characters
• < - an opening angle bracket
• ([^<>]+) - (Group 2) 1 or more characters other than opening or closing angle brackets
• > - a closing angle bracket

The re.findall function gets all capture groups into a list of tuples:

If one or more groups are present in the pattern, return a list of groups; this will be a list of tuples if the pattern has more than one group.

UPDATE :

In case you need to make sure the email is the second element in the tuple, use this code (see demo ):

lst = re.findall(p, test_str)
print([(tpl[1], tpl[0]) if not tpl[1] else tpl for tpl in lst])
# => [('Mr ABC', 'mr@abc.com'), ('Foo, Bar', 'foo@bar.com'), ('', 'mr@xyz.com')]