Hide Email Address From View

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We have clients that we have told not to post their email in a textarea form and they do it anyway.  Is there a way to find the email address in the textarea output (public view page) and then ******* or whatever their entire email address before and after the @??  We do not want any of the email showing.  Thanks in advance.

[craigkaminsky · Accepted solution]

You could use a regular expression (where appropriate in the flow of your code) to locate an email address and replace it with the desired characters. Here's a sample:

ReReplaceNoCase( originalString, "^[a-zA-Z_0-9-'\+~]+(\.[a-zA-Z_0-9-'\+~]+)*@([a-zA-Z_0-9-]+\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,7}$", "*********@******", "ALL" )

This snippet should find any email addresses in the variable originalString and replace it with *********@******.

Hope that helps!

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Thanks!  You rock!

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Hmmm....the code is still not finding the emails in the output.  Any ideas on why this would not work?  The output is just a paragraph of data submitted through a textarea form.

#ReReplaceNoCase(data.comments,"^[a-zA-Z_0-9-'\+~]+(\.[a-zA-Z_0-9-'\+~]+)*@([a-zA-Z_0-9-]+\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,7}$", "*********@******", "ALL")#

[craigkaminsky]

Could you post or send me a sample of the data.comments text? (Is this from a DB where data is the query and comments the field?). I'd probably have better luck looking at a bit of the code!

Cheers,

Craig

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Yes, it is a straight output of an NText SQL database field from a query = #data.comments# - no other code.    The output may contact several paragraphs.  I am just trying to find and mask email addresses placed there so no direct contact can be made.

[craigkaminsky]

Thanks. Running a few tests now...

[craigkaminsky]

Okay, this was my bad. I sent you a regexp that I use to validate emails from a form, where the email would be the only text in the string. The regexp had two characters (the first, or ^, and the last, $) that need to be removed. The ^ character looks for a regexp at the start of a string and the $ indicates the end of a string. Removing these characters from the regexp makes it work.

Here's a sample of working code (just tested):

<cfsavecontent variable="comments">

This is my content. It has some text in it. It also has some email addresses in it. One address is myemail@domain.com and another email is from myotheremail@domain.co.uk. Yet another email address would be from a friend and it is athirdemail@gmail.com.

</cfsavecontent>

<cfscript>

cleanContent = ReReplaceNoCase( comments, "[a-zA-Z_0-9-'\+~]+(\.[a-zA-Z_0-9-'\+~]+)*@([a-zA-Z_0-9-]+\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,7}", "*********@******", "ALL" )

</cfscript>

<cfoutput>ORIGINAL TEXT: <br />#comments#</cfoutput>

<cfoutput>CLEANED TEXT: <br />#cleanContent#</cfoutput>

Sorry about that, I did not look closely enough at my regexp. This one does work though!

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Thanks for your help!  Works great now.  Have a great weekend!

[craigkaminsky]

You are welcome. Sorry for the goof on the initial regexp and you have a great weekend, too!