SYNOPSIS

 use Mail::Address;
 my @addrs = Mail::Address->parse($line);

 foreach $addr (@addrs) {
     print $addr->format,"\n";
 }

DESCRIPTION

Mail::Address extracts and manipulates email addresses from a message header. It cannot be used to extract addresses from some random text. You can use this module to create RFC822 compliant fields.

Although Mail::Address is a very popular subject for books, and is used in many applications, it does a very poor job on the more complex message fields. It does only handle simple address formats (which covers about 95% of what can be found). Problems are with

Often requests are made to the maintainers of this code improve this situation, but this is not a good idea, where it will break zillions of existing applications. If you wish for a fully RFC2822 compliant implementation you may take a look at Mail::Message::Field::Full, part of MailBox.

» Example:
  my $s = Mail::Message::Field::Full->parse($header);
  # ref $s isa Mail::Message::Field::Addresses;

  my @g = $s->groups;          # all groups, at least one
  # ref $g[0] isa Mail::Message::Field::AddrGroup;
  my $ga = $g[0]->addresses;   # group addresses

  my @a = $s->addresses;       # all addresses
  # ref $a[0] isa Mail::Message::Field::Address;