Re: "." before the "@"

From: Michael Shields (shields@msrl.com)
Date: Fri Jun 16 2000 - 19:29:32 EDT


In article <20000616132839.A27141@netmonger.net>,
Christopher Masto <chris@netmonger.net> wrote:
> In general, attempting to "validate" e-mail addresses is a bad idea.
> You'd have to go through the whole RFC822 parsing thing, which is
> a waste of time, given that virtually anything is a valid e-mail
> address if it has an @ in it.

It is not so hard. O'Reilly's "Mastering Regular Expressions"
presents a very long (but quick to execute) Perl regex that matches
all and only valid email addresses.

> I have this fight on a regular basis because I use an e-mail address
> with a "+" in it to track who sells/shares my information. Just
> yesterday, I couldn't sign up for an online credit card system because
> some fool thought any e-mail address with a non-alphanumeric character
> was invalid.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't validate email address syntax; it
means you must do it in a non-naive way.

-- 
Shields.



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