Why are people using regexp for email and other complex validation?

Question

There are a number of email regexp questions popping up here, and I\'m honestly baffled why people are using these insanely obtuse matching expressions rather than a very si

Answer 1

They do it because they see "I want to test whether this text matches the spec" and immediately think "I know, I'll use a regex!" without fully understanding the complexity of the spec or the limitations of regexes. Regexes are a wonderful, powerful tool for handling a wide variety of text-matching tasks, but they are not the perfect tool for every such task and it seems that many people who use them lose sight of that fact.