I make it a habit of not feeding spammers by refusing to publish email addresses on the web. Sometimes, however, it can be very time consuming to remove email addresses when publishing a long document that has a lot of email addresses interspersed in it. (For instance a digest of emails from a listserve)

Does anyone have, know of, or know how to make a script or stand-alone program that will take a file and remove all email addresses for it? I have a general idea how to write one, but I'm a beginnner to PHP. I know it's possible because there are many freeware programs that extract email addresses from documents and save them to a list. This would essentially do the same thing, except instead of saving those addresses to a list, it would simply delete them or replace them with "username@..." (like Yahoo does in there groups website).

If a program like this doesn't already exist, I'll write it myself, but hopefully someone is interested in helping me out along the way. Thanks.

<?php
function strip_email($str) {
	$str = ereg_replace("@.+\.(com|co.uk|net)", "@spam.com", $str);
	echo $str;
}

$text = "This email is the email to filter out: me@something.com";
strip_email($text);
?>

That should filter out all the emails in the document. Have fun