JavaScript Regular Expression Email Validation

user_3797 0
Viewed 453022

This code is always alerting out "null", which means that the string does not match the expression.

var pattern = "^\w+@[a-zA-Z_]+?\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}$"; 

function isEmailAddress(str) {

    str = "azamsharp@gmail.com";      

    alert(str.match(pattern)); 
    return str.match(pattern);    

}
javascript regex
16 Answers

If you define your regular expression as a string then all backslashes need to be escaped, so instead of '\w' you should have '\\w'.

Alternatively, define it as a regular expression:

var pattern = /^\w+@[a-zA-Z_]+?\.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}$/;

BTW, please don't validate email addresses on the client-side. Your regular expression is way too simple to pass for a solid implementation anyway.

See the real thing here: http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html

JimmyP_216770

You may be interested in this question (or this one), which highlights the fact that identifying valid email addresses via regexps is a very hard problem to solve (if at all solvable)

Brian_Agnew_129600
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