Re: Syntax check a string as a valid email address

On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 11:52 AM, Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 10/14/2014 7:46 PM, John Yeung wrote:

I guess it might depend on precisely what you
want to accept as "valid syntax" of an e-mail address, but for basic
"eyeball" tests, %SCAN goes a long way. Maybe throw in %CHECK if
you're so inclined.

Valid is not in the eye of the beholder and not even in the eye of
RFC822. Valid is in the eye of the issuer. Well, one definition of
'valid' anyway.

Right. The definition of "valid" you've just described isn't the
definition I meant.

The point of the language that I used was to capture *your* use case
of trying to catch typos, which I'm sure is the OP's use case as well.
Because that's what almost all of us (in the IT trenches) are doing
when we have these checks. And it's almost all we *can* do, since
there isn't any completely reliable programmatic way to tell whether a
given e-mail address actually exists and is deliverable.

So the kind of checking we want to do *is* up to us, the beholder.
For some of us, it will probably be a net win if we reject non-ASCII
characters (just to take one example). For others of us, that may be
a horrible piece of logic to use.

John Y.