Email RegEx which supports e-mail "+"

Question

I've been trying to create a reg ex that supports gmail's "plus":

name+thing@gmail.com

^[\w-.]+@([\w-]+.)+[\w-]{2,4}$

How do I allow the + ?

There is [*no easy way*](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/201323/using-a-regular-expression-to-validate-an-email-address) to validate an email address [*using regex*](http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html) — Nir Alfasi, Jul 06 '14 at 22:11
@alfasin is right. There's no easy way. However, if you really want to try, take look at this blog post by Phil Haack: [I Knew How to Validate an Email Address Until I Read the RFC](http://haacked.com/archive/2007/08/21/i-knew-how-to-validate-an-email-address-until-i.aspx/). — fourpastmidnight, Jul 06 '14 at 23:20
[tag:regex] is a metatag. Please also tag your question with the language you're using, as regex features vary from implementation to implementation. — ClickRick, Jul 06 '14 at 23:55

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 07 '14 at 01:01

As others said, it's so hard to validate an email-address exactly. But we could do a low level validation. For validation, you don't need to capture anything. So turn the capturing group in your regex to non-capturing group.

^[\w-.+]+@(?:[\w-]+.)+[\w-]{2,4}$

DEMO

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 07 '14 at 02:23

There is only one truly reliable way to store only real email addresses in your database: send a confirmation mail with a confirmation link. vladimir.poetin@whitehouse.gov will pass all checks, but is very probably not a real address.

To catch typos by the user, and thus prevent unnecessary action by your server, just have him/her enter the address twice, and compare the inputs.

Email RegEx which supports e-mail "+"

2 Answers2