Re: Invalid Email Characters

On 13 Jan 2002, at 21:43, DL Neil wrote: > Alexis, > > > Could anybody confirm exactly which characters, if any, are NOT > > valid in an email address. > > > =such rules of the Internet are laid out in documents called "RFC"s > (initially they are "Requests for Comment" but once adopted become > ...) You are looking for RFC822 (although there are others pertinent > to email). Try http://www.freesoft.org/CIE/RFC/822/ > > =unfortunately beware, the 'rules' are honored as much in the breach > as the observance...! You might want to look at the regular expression constructed by Jeffrey Friedl as described here: http://builder.cnet.com/webbuilding/pages/Programming/Scripter/05 2098/ss01.html > Approaches range from simple to complex. On the high end, Jeffrey > Friedl, in his book Mastering Regular Expressions (1997, O'Reilly & > Associates), presents an 11-page explanation of his 4,724-byte > email-validation script. But in the interest of sanity, this regular > expression will suffice for most situations And the rest of that page seems like a good, practical intro to validation. afaik, this is the book for regexes: > Mastering Regular Expressions > Powerful Techniques for Perl and Other Tools http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/regex/ I would reckon it and the RFC are the places to go for full understanding of the matter. Peter --------------------------- "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". -- Philip K. Dick