email address format

[drew010]

im trying to write a regular expression for a program to validate an email address just by making sure the format is correct. i know a few of the rules, like the address must start with and _- a letter or number can contain .'s and -'s then the @ and the domain which can contain only letters .'s and -'s.

that seems pretty much it, is there something im missing? i cant seem to find an rfc or a page with this info. i guess it is more basic than im making it out to be.

anyway. thanks for reading.

[Moonglobe]

technically an email address can contain almost any characters as long as they're in quotes, i.e

"John Smithÿ"@example.com

but in practice that's not really important. my personal rule is "^{[-a-z0-9]+([_\.-][a-z0-9]+)@([a-z0-9]+([.-][a-z0-9]+))+\.[a-z]{2,}$"} but that's an eregi pattern and not very efficient. i've never mothered to convert that to PCRE however, but you can probably do that the way you're sounding. 🙂

hth
moon