Hey all, thanks as always for the quick responses. I actually found a very simple way to do what I needed to do. In short, I needed to take an email which had a large number of addresses in the 'to' field, and place just the identifiers (everything to the left of @domain.com), in a python list.
I simply highlighted all the addresses and placed them in a text file called emails.txt. Then I had the following code which placed each line in the file into the list 'names': [code] fileHandle = open('/Users/Matt/Documents/python/results.txt','r') names = fileHandle.readlines() [/code] Now, the 'names' list has values looking like this: ['aa...@domain.com \n', 'bb...@domain.com\n', etc]. So I ran the following code: [code] for x in names: st_list.append(x.replace('@domain.com\n','')) [/code] And that did the trick! 'Names' now has ['aaa12', 'bbb34', etc]. Obviously this only worked because all of the domain names were the same. If they were not then based on your comments and my own research, I would've had to use regex and the split(), which looked massively complicated to learn. Thanks all. Matt On Feb 15, 8:01 pm, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: > galileo228 <mattbar...@gmail.com> writes: > > I'm trying to write python code that will open a textfile and find the > > email addresses inside it. I then want the code to take just the > > characters to the left of the "@" symbol, and place them in a list. > > Email addresses can have more than one �...@’ character. In fact, the > quoting rules allow the local-part to contain *any ASCII character* and > remain valid. > > > Any suggestions would be much appeciated! > > For a brief but thorough treatment of parsing email addresses, see RFC > 3696, “Application Techniques for Checking and Transformation of Names” > <URL:http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3696.txt>, specifically section 3. > > -- > \ “What I have to do is see, at any rate, that I do not lend | > `\ myself to the wrong which I condemn.” —Henry Thoreau, _Civil | > _o__) Disobedience_ | > Ben Finney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list