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phpregexvalidationemail-validation

How to validate an Email in PHP?

How can I validate the input value is a valid email address using php5. Now I am using this code 

function isValidEmail($email){ 
     $pattern = "^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,3})$"; 

     if (eregi($pattern, $email)){ 
        return true; 
     } 
     else { 
        return false; 
     }    
}

but it shows deprecated error. How can I fix this issue. Please help me.

Solution

  • You can use the filter_var() function, which gives you a lot of handy validation and sanitization options.

    filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)

    If you don't want to change your code that relied on your function, just do:

    function isValidEmail($email){ 
    return filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) !== false;
}

    Note: For other uses (where you need Regex), the deprecated ereg function family (POSIX Regex Functions) should be replaced by the preg family (PCRE Regex Functions). There are a small amount of differences, reading the Manual should suffice.

    Update 1: As pointed out by @binaryLV:

    PHP 5.3.3 and 5.2.14 had a bug related to FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL, which resulted in segfault when validating large values. Simple and safe workaround for this is using strlen() before filter_var(). I'm not sure about 5.3.4 final, but it is written that some 5.3.4-snapshot versions also were affected.

    This bug has already been fixed.

    Update 2: This method will of course validate bazmega@kapa as a valid email address, because in fact it is a valid email address. But most of the time on the Internet, you also want the email address to have a TLD: bazmega@kapa.com. As suggested in this blog post (link posted by @Istiaque Ahmed), you can augment filter_var() with a regex that will check for the existence of a dot in the domain part (will not check for a valid TLD though):

    function isValidEmail($email) {
    return filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) 
        && preg_match('/@.+\./', $email);
}

    As @Eliseo Ocampos pointed out, this problem only exists before PHP 5.3, in that version they changed the regex and now it does this check, so you do not have to.