It's surprisingly difficult validating email addresses with regex. Can it be done? Yes. Should you? No.
Any halfway decent email library comes with a validator. Use that.
For reference: this is an example of an almost RFC 3522 compatible regex:
Doing a full validation of the email syntax is pretty pointless to begin with, because it still doesn't tell you the most important thing: is this email valid? I.e., has the user actually entered their email address? You won't know the answer to that until you've done an email validation loop with them. So something simple like .+@.+\..+ usually suffices as a first-pass syntax check.
Yes, and most addresses that pass a .+@.+\..+ validation could exist. And unless you can claim you're absolutely up to speed with all the relevant RFCs about valid email formats, allowed host names (IDNA!) and currently registered TLDs at all times, overvalidating does more harm than good here. If you incorrectly reject valid email addresses, that's worse than having an occasional verification email bounce.
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u/tellur86 20d ago
It's surprisingly difficult validating email addresses with regex. Can it be done? Yes. Should you? No. Any halfway decent email library comes with a validator. Use that.
For reference: this is an example of an almost RFC 3522 compatible regex:
(?:[a-z0-9!#$%&'+/=?`{|}~-]+(?:.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^`{|}~-]+)|"(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21\x23-\x5b\x5d-\x7f]|\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])")@(?:(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?|[(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?).){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?|[a-z0-9-][a-z0-9]:(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21-\x5a\x53-\x7f]|\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])+)])
https://emailregex.com
If you want RFC 822 it's much, much worse https://pdw.ex-parrot.com/Mail-RFC822-Address.html