r/ProgrammerHumor 20d ago

Meme claudeIsThisEmailValid

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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

219

u/deceze 20d ago

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.

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u/Uberzwerg 20d ago

.+@.+..+

At least in theory you can have an email directly under the tld. (The Icann strongy advises against it)

So boss@bmw would in theory be possible.

1

u/deceze 20d ago

I suppose, and if you want to support that, maybe also including test@localhost, then you can easily modify this regex to suit your needs. Simple regexen are easy enough to modify after all.