Sent mail date regular expression

when replying on an email usually the mail client adds the sent date of the email before the original mail something like the following:

my reply
On Fri, 2011-06-17 at 12:33 -0400, friendly user wrote:
> Reply ABOVE THIS LINE
and here is the original message.

and I want to make a regular expression to match the second & third lines开发者_JAVA技巧 and get it's beginning index, so i can substring from 0 to that date.

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A regular expression do match the date would be (Mon|Tue|Wed|Thu|Fri|Sat|Sun), \d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2} at \d{2}:\d{2} (-)?\d{4}(\r\n|\r|\n)> Reply ABOVE THIS LINE. I don't know Java but I imagine there is a RegEx match function which will return the character position of the match, if it finds one. Otherwise the hack is to add a .*$ to the end of the RegEx and use the replace function to replace the date and everything after it with nothing, leaving you with just the part you want.

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I'm no regex wizard, but You'd need something similar to:

^(On ).{3}, (19|20)\d\d-\d\d-\d\d at \d\d:\d\d -\d\d\d\d,

Obviously its not as clean in validating valid times and dates but I'm assuming your email server isn't spitting out invalids.

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i tried the following and it works:

On.*?wrote:(\r\n|\r|\n)> Reply ABOVE THIS LINE