RFC822: Email address verification using RegExp November 10, 2007
Posted by Al in : programming,weird , trackbackRegular expressions are very clever, cool (in an uber-geeky way) and amazingly powerful. They are also almost incomprehensible to al but the ultimate Perl geeks, and can be pretty scary, literally. This regexp, for example, has a certain beauty in it’s immensity, and is scary as you know what it does (validate whether an email address is, in fact, valid), but you haven’t got a clue as to how it goes about doing that. I suppose if you spent time breaking it down into it’s component parts, and analysed each in turn, then you might be able to work out what is going on, but I had a feeling this was written in a higher level language, and then translated into a regexp for speed and efficiency. However it was made, behold RFC822 in all it’s glory, and tremble before it’s inscrutability.
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