What does this mean?

Junior WebHelper Joined: 09 May 2002 Posts: 15

"/^([a-zA-Z0-9\-_\.]+)\@[a-zA-Z0-9]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}$/";

someone posted this claiming it could be used for validation. can you please explain to me wat all the slashes and stuff mean?

Posted: Sat May 18, 2002 5:35 am (21 years, 11 months ago)

It is basically a regular expression. The one you have given will validate emails, that is whether the given email is in correct format or not.

Learning to Use Regular Expressions by Example is an excellent article. There are whole chapters dedicated to this in books of Perl(mostly).

Posted: Sat May 18, 2002 5:45 am (21 years, 11 months ago)

By the way. the given regular expression will not validate the new domains having 4 letters at end, like in .info

/^([a-zA-Z0-9\-_\.]+)\@[a-zA-Z0-9]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4}$/
will validate the new ones also

Junior WebHelper Joined: 09 May 2002 Posts: 15

/^([a-zA-Z0-9\-_\.]+)\@[a-zA-Z0-9]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,4}$/

please explain each section individually

Team Member Joined: 06 Jan 2002 Posts: 2564

Did you read the article mentioned above?