CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpregex
somdow
somdow

Reputation: 6318

regex assistance for validating an email address

I am trying to validate an email field. I took this regex from somewhere on here for and I used it on another form I made and it works fine. Yet when I use it now its not matching.

All I am trying to do is to check the email and if it is good then log it in the proper field in the db.

For the sake of not pasting a bunch of stuff... I have stripped out the problem lines and going to pseudo code next few lines.

Essentially, vars are these:

$theEmail = $_post email from first page here
$regEx ='#^[a-z0-9.!\#$%&\'*+-/=?^_`{|}~]+@([0-9.]+|([^\s]+\.+[a-z]{2,6}))$#si';

and my php is this

//essentially other field validation will go here...for now testing only empty.
    if(!empty($theEmail)){
        if (preg_match($regEx, $formEmail)) {
            //send it through to db.

        } else { //error stuff here }
    }

essentially, this never comes true. The email never validates no matter what I do and as I said I wrote another more complicated form that validates data just fine

Not sure what is going on.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 107

Answers (4)

Tchoupi
Tchoupi

Reputation: 14681

I would suggest you to use filter_var instead.

if (filter_var($theEmail, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
  //send it through to db.
} else {
  //error stuff here
}

Upvotes: 4

user1162388
user1162388

Reputation:

give this a try! hopefully it will resolve your query, although there are infinte regulare expressions for email

^[a-z0-9,!#\$%&'\*\+/=\?\^_`\{\|}~-]+(\.[a-z0-9,!#\$%&'\*\+/=\?\^_`\{\|}~-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*\.([a-z]{2,})$

For testing visit Regular Expression Tester

Upvotes: 0

David B
David B

Reputation: 2698

/^[a-z0-9.!\#$%&\'*+-=?^_{|}~]+@([0-9.]+|([^\s]+\.+[a-z]{2,6}))$/

I removed the first # and ending #si, and took out the / from the = since it was giving me problems. This generates a match on my e-mail address here:

<?
$theEmail = '[email protected]';
$regEx ='/^[a-z0-9.!\#$%&\'*+-=?^_`{|}~]+@([0-9.]+|([^\s]+\.+[a-z]{2,6}))$/';
print_r(preg_match($regEx, $theEmail));
?>

Though this regex is very complex for something like e-mail validation- I would recommend trying to refine it and fine-tune it before putting it into production.

Upvotes: 0

Joey
Joey

Reputation: 354536

With email validation there are simple solutions that catch 99 % of all mistakes and complex solutions that might catch a tenth of a percent more, yet be unreadable.

Go the easy route and just check for something like

.+@.+\..+

Yes, it will allow an email address like [email protected] but that's probably a smaller price to pay than a user who cannot register because your 500-character regex has a mistake in it somewhere, rejecting a valid address.

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions