![[xkcd] Regular Expressions (10 Jan 2007)](https://programming.dev/pictrs/image/f2b862d9-f433-46ad-bdca-7d193e01d628.png){kind=link}
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Wait, forgot to escape a space. Wheeeeee[taptaptap]eeeeee!
Transcript
[in a yellow box:]
Whenever I learn a new skill I concoct elaborate fantasy scenarios where it lets me save the day.Megan: Oh no! The killer must have followed her on vacation!
[Megan points to computer.]
Megan: But to find them we’d have to search through 200 MB of emails looking for something formatted like an address!
Cueball: It’s hopeless!Off-panel voice: Everybody stand back.
Off-panel voice: I know regular expressions.
[A man swings in on a rope, toward the computer.]
tap tap
The word PERL! appears in a bubble.[The man swings away, and the other characters cheer.]
Hmm…
Oh no
Who’s gonna tell them? I’d do it but I’m still busy parsing HTML with regex… it’s working any minute now!
What am I missing? I typically used it as a sanity check and would vet the changes. Never as a one-click modify. Or is there something else I should know about?
This short article has some good examples at the top: https://sigparser.com/developers/email-parsing/regex-validate-email-address/
Basically, you can very easily make a regex to match 99% of email addresses, but technically an email could be something like “!@[124.35.6.72]”
Ah, yeah. It was never meant to be a be all and all. Just something to clean up the complete trash before I started proofreading. Besides, these were emails the customer provided and could easily be changed afterwords. Their fault if we get bad emails in the list ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is the way
You’re completely correct. In practice, it’s usually good enough to just check for “.+@.+” or “.+@.+\…+”. Why? It’s broad enough to allow almost everything and it rejects the most obvious typos. And in the end, the final verification would be to send an email there which contains a link, that one has to click to finalize the signup/change. Even if you had a regex that could filter every possible adress that’s possible according to the standard, you still wouldn’t know whether it really exists.
I wrote a regex that matches 100% of email addresses and had no problems using it. It’s “.+@.+”
Meme aside that’s what I’d use tbh. Or the ultimate email validation: just sending the signup email and if they typed an invalid email it won’t send
Looks like we found the intern who coded the check that rejects “[email protected]”.
Follow up by tech support successfully emailing me at that address to tell me to use a different email address.
Now do the one where spaces are allowed in the local part as well
While email addresses are technically a regular language but I have seen a the regex that takes up a whole page claiming to be the first standard compliant one.
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