Applescript delete certain text?

Question

Hello all. I need some help. I have a mailing list for my business and the way email addresses are entered is like this:
"email","date","ip"
So a quick example would be:
"[email protected]","1268080664","XX.XXX.XXX.XXX"
I don't want to use the online email sender, I want to use one one on my mac. I set up automator to download the text file the info is stored in, but then I need it to delete some necessary functions. Before you ask, "Why not just make your PHP file remove the extra stuff?" and my answer is that I want to keep it there incase I use it in the future. So basically, I am wondering how in applescript, I can have it remove everything but the email address. The email is always laying between the first two quotes, so that might make it easier.
If you can help, thank you very much. If not, can you refer me to where I can get help?

Answer 1

As long as you're sure about the format, text item delimiters are your friend here.
First set the text item delimiters to ". This will logically divide the text into chunks based on each occurrence of the " character. Then just ask for the second 'chunk' (the first 'chunk' will be everything up to the first ", which in this case is an empty string).
set theData to paragraphs of (read file "path:to:your.txt")
set emailAddresses to {} -- somewhere to store the addresses when we're done
set {old_delims, my text item delimiters} to {my text item delimiters, "\""} -- setup the TIDs
repeat with eachLine in theData
  copy text item 2 of eachLine to end of emailAddresses -- extract the email address
end repeat
set my text item delimiters to old_delims -- clean up when we're done
Of course, you don't say what you want to do with the addresses. In this case I just add them to a list emaiAddresses, but you can do whatever you want with them now.