Extract mentions

What it's for

From a caption, a thread or a pile of comments it pulls out every username mentioned with an at sign, one per line. It helps whoever runs a page and has to thank or get back to the people who were tagged, whoever is putting together a list of collaborations, and whoever wants to see quickly who is named in a long conversation without scrolling through all of it.

How it finds them

Anything starting with @ and carrying on with letters, digits, underscores and dots is picked up, those being the characters allowed in social usernames. Accented letters are fine. The dot counts only inside the name: a mention at the end of a sentence like «@luca.» comes out as @luca, without the sentence's full stop. A fediverse name, like @name@mastodon.social, is picked up whole, with its server.

Duplicates are removed without looking at capitals, as the social networks do: @Mario and @mario are the same username, so someone mentioned ten times appears once, in the form used the first time.

What stays out

An email address has the at sign in the middle, stuck to a letter: «john@example.com» produces no mention, because that at sign does not open a username. If addresses are exactly what you want, the page is Email extractor. The same goes for an at sign inside a web address, like the one in profile links on some sites, which stays part of the link.

The same text, five things to look for

Above the box there are five buttons, and the same text can be run through the other kinds too, with the same rules: Email extractor, Link extractor, Extract hashtags and Extract phone numbers.

The same text with the same button gives the same list on all five pages.

Nearby tools

For hashtags instead of mentions there is Extract hashtags, and for links Extract links from text. If you're writing the post and want to know how much room is left, the count for each platform is done by Social character counter.