Regex for email address

Question

Can someone show me a sample RegEx for an email address and how to use in in Objective-C?

Looking for something that fits: [email protected]

Answer 1

As featured on: http://github.com/benofsky/DHValidation

- (BOOL) validateEmail: (NSString *) candidate {     NSString *emailRegex = @"[A-Z0-9a-z._%+-]+@[A-Za-z0-9.-]+\\.[A-Za-z]{2,4}";      NSPredicate *emailTest = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"SELF MATCHES %@", emailRegex];       return [emailTest evaluateWithObject:candidate]; } 

Or add the http://regexkit.sourceforge.net/RegexKitLite/ to your project and do the regex yourself like above.

Also to reply to the issue of checking if an e-mail address is actually real, not just works with regex you could use some service like: http://verify-email.org/register/levels.html

Please note this answer doesn't take into account the newer length TLDs such as .online; to include those update the final {2,4} to be {2,63}

Answer 2

NSString *string= @"[email protected] [email protected] [email protected]"; NSError *error = NULL; NSRegularExpression *regex = nil; regex = [NSRegularExpression regularExpressionWithPattern:@"\\w+@[a-zA-Z_]+?\\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6}"                                                   options:NSRegularExpressionCaseInsensitive                                                     error:&error];    NSUInteger numberOfMatches = 0; numberOfMatches = [regex numberOfMatchesInString:string                                          options:0                                            range:NSMakeRange(0, [string length])]; NSLog(@"numberOfMatches is: %lu", numberOfMatches); 

There are more options of course. Read here.