Validate Email Addresses With PHP

If you’re a web programmer, there will come a time when you need to validate an email address. It’s going to happen, so just accept it. In newer versions of PHP, there is built in functionality for this. However, for those of us not lucky enough to be running the latest and greatest version, we can use regular expressions.

The following PHP function will validate email addresses using regular expressions. True is returned on success, and false is returned otherwise.

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function validate_email($email) {
return eregi("^[_a-z0-9-]+(\.[_a-z0-9-]+)*@[a-z0-9-]+(\.[a-z0-9-]+)*(\.[a-z]{2,4})$", $email);
}