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marsha grasett
9,995 PointsPatterns for Email Validation. yay or nay?
I have used one in a form but now am reading: http://html5pattern.com/ which states:
Please do not use a pattern for email validation. Every regular expression for email validation is missing something. Lots of people gone through a process with the conclusion, that it is nearly impossible to get a perfect validation. The good part about is, we can leave this to our browser developers. They got it quite right and we should use their standard for email validation now.
<input type="email" name="" value="" required />
1 Answer
James Barnett
39,199 PointsAs with all HTML5 features, support for type=email varies from browser to browser. So I'm not sure that relying on browser devs is the best idea.
Always remember the first rule of form validation, validate server-side in addition to client-side. So you are still going to need a regex for your PHP (or whatever you are using server side.)
Next question, what is your goal of validating an email address client side. Are you just creating a basic sanity check. For that I'd suggest: pattern="[^@]+@[^@]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6}"
If your goal is to make sure your the email addresses you collect are actually valid, maybe because you send out a large-scale mailing list and are charged per email address you can go for a more heavy handed solution.
There's mailcheck.js or verimail.js they will both check for common typos in email addresses.
If you want to match every possible valid email address (on principle* then try:
/^[-a-z0-9~!$%^&*_=+}{\'?]+(\.[-a-z0-9~!$%^&*_=+}{\'?]+)*@([a-z0-9_][-a-z0-9_]*(\.[-a-z0-9_]+)*\.(aero|arpa|biz|com|coop|edu|gov|info|int|mil|museum|name|net|org|pro|travel|mobi|[a-z][a-z])|([0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}))(:[0-9]{1,5})?$/i