Best way to parse string of email addresses

Question

So i am working with some email header data, and for the to:, from:, cc:, and bcc: fields the email address(es) can be expressed in a number of different ways:

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Answer 1

There is no generic simple solution to this. The RFC you want is RFC2822, which describes all of the possible configurations of an email address. The best you are going to get that will be correct is to implement a state-based tokenizer that follows the rules specified in the RFC.