Tuesday, June 16, 2009

How to Find or Validate an Email Address

How to Find or Validate an Email Address: "We get a more practical implementation of RFC 2822 if we omit the syntax using double quotes and square brackets. It will still match 99.99% of all email addresses in actual use today.

[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*@(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?

A further change you could make is to allow any two-letter country code top level domain, and only specific generic top level domains. This regex filters dummy email addresses like asdf@adsf.adsf. You will need to update it as new top-level domains are added.

[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*@(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+(?:[A-Z]{2}|com|org|net|gov|mil|biz|info|mobi|name|aero|jobs|museum)\b

So even when following official standards, there are still trade-offs to be made. Don't blindly copy regular expressions from online libraries or discussion forums. Always test them on your own data and with your own applications."

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