I'm reading Email headers (in Node.js, for those keeping score) and they are VARY varied. E-mail addresses in the to field look like:

"Jake Smart" , [email protected], "Development, Business" 

and a variety of other formats. Is there any way to parse all of this out?

Here's my first stab:

1. Run a split() on - to break up the different people into an array
2. For each item, see if there's a or ".
3. If there's a , then parse out the email
4. If there's a ", then parse out the name
5. For the name, if there's a ,, then split to get Last, First names.

If I first do a split on the ,, then the Development, Business will cause a split error. Spaces are also inconsistent. Plus, there may be more e-mail address formats that come through in headers that I haven't seen before. Is there any way (or maybe an awesome Node.js library) that will do all of this for me?

There's a npm module for this - mimelib (or mimelib-noiconv if you are on windows or don't want to compile node-iconv)

npm install mimelib-noiconv

And the usage would be:

var mimelib = require("mimelib-noiconv");
var addressStr = '[email protected], "Development, Business" ';
var addresses = mimelib.parseAddresses(addressStr);

console.log(addresses);
// [{ address: '[email protected]', name: '' },
//  { address: '[email protected]', name: 'Development, Business' }]