Detecting emails and social media accounts in text with C#

Question

I am creating some kind of social platform that people have to pay to use it. I am supposed to not allow anyone to write their email address, social media account username (e.g. Instagram username) or their phone number).

Scanning every single profile update manually will be a cumbersome and costly operation so I am thinking of a way to find and remove such contact details, at least to some extent.

I have used regext to find the @ character but that will not really work as users can easily ignore the @ character!

Is there a library that I can use for this porpuse?

Answer 1

Just like @Robert Harvey noted, it's a pretty hopeless task.

Some recommendations you can use:

1. Filter out any profiles that contains url matches to a social site. Or disallow links in general.
2. Filter out only the profiles that mention the names/name shortcuts to social sites, that way you'll have a lot less work.
3. At the place where users can enter such unneeded details you could put a large disclaimer that linking to any social media in anyway is prohibited and can result in account suspension.
4. You can filter out profiles which have a sequence of numbers in a row(ignoring spaces/dashes) to find phone numbers.