From: Dominik Honnef <dominikho@...>
Date: 2008-02-01T02:12:31+09:00
Subject: Re: validate email address?

On [Fri, 01.02.2008 01:14], Eric H. wrote:
> Anyone have a code snippet that tells whether an email address is
> "valid" but not necessarily whether it is a working address because that
> much I can sort out through my mail server through any bounces.
> 
> I have a database of addresses where the person entering the data has a
> bad, bad, bad, BAD habit of not validating them before entering them and
> so I get things like "***DO NOT SHARE DATA***" and "lmnopaol.com" and
> the like. It's not my company or else she'd be going over all the
> entries by hand.
> 
> Thanks in advance

email = "email@host.tld"
email2 = "email@h@ost.tld"

email =~ /^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
#=> true/0
email2 =~ /^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
#=> nil/false

I hope that helped.
(That strange looking thing is called a regular expression)
-- 
Dominik Honnef