How should I validate an e-mail address?

Question

What\'s a good technique for validating an e-mail address (e.g. from a user input field) in Android? org.apache.commons.validator.routines.EmailValidator doesn\'t seem to be

Answer 1

Don't use a reg-ex.

Apparently the following is a reg-ex that correctly validates most e-mails addresses that conform to RFC 2822, (and will still fail on things like "user@gmail.com.nospam", as will org.apache.commons.validator.routines.EmailValidator)

(?:[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+)*|"(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21\x23-\x5b\x5d-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])*")@(?:(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?|\[(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?|[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]:(?:[\x01-\x08\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x1f\x21-\x5a\x53-\x7f]|\\[\x01-\x09\x0b\x0c\x0e-\x7f])+)\])

Possibly the easiest way to validate an e-mail to just send a confirmation e-mail to the address provided and it it bounces then it's not valid.

If you want to perform some basic checks you could just check that it's in the form *@*

If you have some business logic specific validation then you could perform that using a regex, e.g. must be a gmail.com account or something.