EmailReplyParser

EmailReplyParser is a PHP library for parsing plain text email content, based on GitHub’s email_reply_parser library written in Ruby.

Installation

The recommended way to install EmailReplyParser is through Composer:

composer require willdurand/email-reply-parser

Usage

Instantiate an EmailParser object and parse your email:

<?php

use EmailReplyParser\Parser\EmailParser;

$email = (new EmailParser())->parse($emailContent);

You get an Email object that contains a set of Fragment objects. The Email class exposes two methods:

• getFragments(): returns all fragments;
• getVisibleText(): returns a string which represents the content considered as “visible”.

The Fragment represents a part of the full email content, and has the following API:

<?php

$fragment = current($email->getFragments());

$fragment->getContent();

$fragment->isSignature();

$fragment->isQuoted();

$fragment->isHidden();

$fragment->isEmpty();

Alternatively, you can rely on the EmailReplyParser to either parse an email or get its visible content in a single line of code:

$email = \EmailReplyParser\EmailReplyParser::read($emailContent);

$visibleText = \EmailReplyParser\EmailReplyParser::parseReply($emailContent);

Known Issues

Quoted Headers

Quoted headers aren’t picked up if there’s an extra line break:

On <date>, <author> wrote:

> blah

Also, they’re not picked up if the email client breaks it up into multiple lines. GMail breaks up any lines over 80 characters for you.

On <date>, <author>
wrote:
> blah

The above On ....wrote: can be cleaned up with the following regex:

$fragment_without_date_author = preg_replace(
  '/\nOn(.*?)wrote:(.*?)$/si',
  "",
  $fragment->getContent()
);

Note though that we’re search for “on” and “wrote”. Therefore, it won’t work with other languages.

Possible solution: Remove “reply@reply.github.com” lines…

Weird Signatures

Lines starting with - or _ sometimes mark the beginning of signatures:

Hello

--
Rick

Not everyone follows this convention:

Hello

Mr Rick Olson
Galactic President Superstar Mc Awesomeville
GitHub

**********************DISCLAIMER***********************************
* Note: blah blah blah                                            *
**********************DISCLAIMER***********************************

Strange Quoting

Apparently, prefixing lines with > isn’t universal either:

Hello

--
Rick

________________________________________
From: Bob [reply@reply.github.com]
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2011 6:16 PM
To: Rick

Unit Tests

Setup the test suite using Composer:

$ composer install

Run it using PHPUnit:

$ ./vendor/bin/simple-phpunit

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING file.

Credits

• GitHub
• William Durand

License

EmailReplyParser is released under the MIT License. See the bundled LICENSE file for details.