Question

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.

Answer 1

/^[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 = '[e-mail]';
$regEx ='/^[a-z0-9.!\#$%&\'*+-=?^_`{|}~]+@([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.