[SOLVED] How do you extract multiple email addresses from an RFC 2822 mail header in python?

How do you extract multiple email addresses from an RFC 2822 mail header in python?

Python's email module is great for parsing headers. However, the To: header can have multiple recipients, and there may be multiple To: headers. So how do I split out each of the email addresses? I can't split on the comma, since the comma can be quoted. Is there a way to do this?

Demo code:

msg="""To: user1@company1.com, "User Two" <user2@company2.com", "Three, User <user3@company3.com>                               
From: anotheruser@user.com                                                                                                      
Subject: This is a subject                                                                                                      

This is the message.                                                                                                            
"""

import email

msg822 = email.message_from_string(msg)
for to in msg822.get_all("To"):
    print("To:",to)

Current output:

$ python x.py
To: user1@company1.com, "User Two" <user2@company2.com", "Three, User <user3@company3.com>
$

Solution

Pass all of the To lines through email.utils.getaddresses():

msg="""To: user1@company1.com, John Doe <user2@example.com>, "Public, John Q." <user3@example.com>
From: anotheruser@user.com
Subject: This is a subject

This is the message.
"""

import email

msg822 = email.message_from_string(msg)
for to in email.utils.getaddresses(msg822.get_all("To", [])):
    print("To:",to)

Note that I rewrote your To line. I believe your example wasn't a valid format.

Reference: https://docs.python.org/3/library/email.utils.html#email.utils.getaddresses