Recently, I needed to extract all email addresses from a document for further processing. While I ended up writing my own regular expression, in the beginning I wanted to search for a public web service for this task. Appearantly, there exist lots of such services. However, I could not find one that works without transmitting the entered plain text to some shady server where I have no control over the sent data. This is unacceptable since email addresses are almost always sensible data points.
Out of frustration, I decided to set up such a service myself. I used this opportunity to get my feet wet with Vue.js and GitLab Pages (as described in a previous blog post).
Email Extractor – a new public web service
Here is the result: https://email-extractor.knasmueller.net/
In case you wonder about the absence of buttons: Vue.js is able to process the entered input directly and immediately outputs the results as you type – which quite frankly is absolutely amazing. I did in fact test the performance of this feature with a few thousand paragraphs of “Lorem Ipsum” and correct results were generated in a few seconds.
As you can verify using Firefox’s network monitoring tool, the entered data is not sent to any web service; instead, Vue.js processes it as you type and extracts all strings that match my regular expression (please report if I missed some edge cases. Initially, I forgot about the + character that is used for example by Gmail).
Naturally, I also set up a Letsencrypt SSL certificate which also worked flawlessly using GitLab Pages.
Setting up this service was a fun way for getting to know Vue.js and I’m already looking forward to creating more similar ones in the future.