Regex with escaped less-than and greater-than around e-mail address?

In Notepad++, I am looking to do a regex that replaces this:

Joe Schmoe <joe.schmoe@gmail.com>

with

joe.schmoe@gmail.com

I would've thought that:

^(.*) \<(.*?)\>$

would've put the required value into "\2". However, Notepad++ reports that it finds no matches.

Your problem comes from \< and \> than stand for word boundary. Do not escape these characters if you want to match < and >.

• <kbd>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd>H</kbd>
• Find what: ^.+?<(.+?)>
• Replace with: $1
• TICK Wrap around
• SELECT Regular expression
• UNTICK . matches newline
• <kbd>Replace all</kbd>

Explanation:

^               # beginning of line
.+?             # 1 or more any character but newline, not greedy
<               # literally
(.+?)           # group 1, 1 or more any character but newline, not greedy
>               # literally

Screenshot (before):

Screenshot (after):

Be aware that will not work for email like "very.(),:;<>[]\".VERY.\"very@\\ \"very\".unusual"@strange.example.com

You can use the following regex to match your whole line of text:

.*<([.\w]+@\w+\.\w+)>

Then you can replace with \1, containing your email only. Make sure to have "Regular Expression" option checked.

Regex Explanation:

• .*: any sequence of characters
• <: open angular parenthesis
• ([.\w]+@\w+\.\w+): Group containing the email
  • [\.\w]+: email name
  • @: @
  • \w+(?:\.\w+): the domain
• >: closed angular parenthesis

Check the regex demo here.

Note: If you need a more complex email pattern matching, you can look this thread.