PHP Cookbook

13.5. Matching a Valid Email Address

Problem

You want to check if an email address is valid.

Solution

This is a popular question and everyone has a different answer, depending on their definition of valid. If valid means a mailbox belonging to a legitimate user at an existing hostname, the real answer is that you can’t do it correctly, so don’t even bother. However, sometimes a regular expression can help weed out some simple typos and obvious bogus attempts. That said, our favorite pattern that doesn’t require maintenance is:

/^[^@\s]+@([-a-z0-9]+\.)+[a-z]{2,}$/i

If the IMAP extension is enabled, you can also use imap_rfc822_parse_adrlist( ) :

$parsed = imap_rfc822_parse_adrlist($email_address, $default_host)
if ('INVALID_ADDRESS' == $parsed['mailbox']) {
    // bad address
}

Ironically, because this function is so RFC-compliant, it may not give the results you expect.

Discussion

The pattern in the Solution accepts any email address that has a name of any sequence of characters that isn’t a @ or whitespace. After the @, you need at least one domain name consisting of the letters a-z, the numbers 0-9, and the hyphen, separated by periods, and proceed it with as many subdomains you want. Finally, you end with either a two-digit country code or another top-level domain, such as .com or .edu.

The solution pattern is handy because it still works if ICANN adds new top-level domains. However, it does allow through a few false positives. This more strict pattern explicitly enumerates the current ...