>Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.”
Now they have two problems.
It was a dumb thing to say when he said it, and it still is. Granted, REs aren't appropriate for everything, but for some problems they're the right solution.
>So eschew your fancy regular expressions already. If you really want to do checking of email addresses right on the signup page, include a confirmation field so they have to type it twice.
No. Just no. I hate you and everyone else who thinks this is a good idea. Don't make me type things twice - the point of computers is to take some of the grunt work out of life, not to add more.
There's nothing wrong with checking an email address for validity, and there's nothing wrong with using a RE provided it's correct. You'll miss a whole bunch of typos, but since you're going to send out a "click to activate" mail anyway it doesn't matter, and the ones you catch will save the user a bit of time.
It was a dumb thing to say when he said it, and it still is. Granted, REs aren't appropriate for everything, but for some problems they're the right solution.
>So eschew your fancy regular expressions already. If you really want to do checking of email addresses right on the signup page, include a confirmation field so they have to type it twice.
No. Just no. I hate you and everyone else who thinks this is a good idea. Don't make me type things twice - the point of computers is to take some of the grunt work out of life, not to add more.
There's nothing wrong with checking an email address for validity, and there's nothing wrong with using a RE provided it's correct. You'll miss a whole bunch of typos, but since you're going to send out a "click to activate" mail anyway it doesn't matter, and the ones you catch will save the user a bit of time.