I'm currently using a RichTextEditor for a user to build HTML for a site.
However, I want the application to scan for emails and encode them so they are
protected from spam bots when they go to the live site. I've written a regular
expression to find an email and it seems to work, but it only returns one email
at a time from the string. I have had to revert to a while loop to traverse
the string until I'm satisfied. I don't particularly like that method and
would like to just do one String.match() query to retrieve all of the emails.
Can anyone see something here that I'm missing?



private function encodeHTML(event:Event):void
{
// grab the text
var result:String = editor.htmlText;

// create the pattern to search for an email
//var emailPattern:RegExp = /(\w|[_.\-])+@((\w|-)+\.)+\w{2,4}+/;
var emailPattern:RegExp = /[a-z][\w.-]+@\w[\w.-]+\.[\w.-]*[a-z][a-z]+/;
var emails:Array = result.match(emailPattern);

while(emails != null) {
for(var i:int = 0; i < emails.length; i++)
{
// encode the email and replace it with the encoded email
var encodedEmail:String = encodeEmail(emails[i]);
var replaceExp:RegExp = new RegExp(emails[i], "");

result = result.replace(replaceExp, encodedEmail);
}

emails = result.match(emailPattern);
}

results.text = result;
}

Try adding the global flag (g):

....
var emailPattern:RegExp = /[a-z][\w.-]+@\w[\w.-]+\.[\w.-]*[a-z][a-z]+/g;
....

TS