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Comment by constant_change | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes it's best just not to bother with a regular expression. Email addresses are a prime example of where this is true.

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This has been discussed to death all over the place, but I think the take home is not to be too clever rather than not to use regexes. I tend to look for 'something at something dot something':

    .+@.+\..+

I believe this allows all valid addresses (as well as lots of invalid ones, obviously). But I'm sure someone will let us know if not. :)

If you REALLY need to validate en email address:

http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html

but again, only if you REALLY, REALLY , REALLY want to.

That's ridiculous and awesome. I'm glad regular expressions exist so we can make garbage/magic like that

For a second, I thought it was a perl script.

Obvious counterexample: me@localhost. (Not that this is a useful counterexample in the context of a form submission.)

http://fightingforalostcause.net/misc/2006/compare-email-reg... is a good site that has a number of email regex variants and how well they do on various email address formats.

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