👀 Views: 70 💬 Answers: 1 📅 Created: 2025-06-26

regex php email-validation PHP

I'm writing unit tests and I recently switched to I've been trying to validate email addresses using a regex pattern in PHP, but I'm working with unexpected behavior when special characters are present... My current regex pattern is as follows: ```php $emailRegex = '/^[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,}$/'; ``` This pattern works well for most cases, but I found that it fails for emails such as `user+test@example.co.uk` and `first.last@sub-domain.example.com`. When I test these emails, I'm getting false negatives, which is frustrating because they should be valid according to the general email format rules. I've tried various adjustments to the regex, but it seems like I'm missing something about the allowed characters after the `+` and before the `@`. For instance, I attempted to modify the pattern like this: ```php $emailRegex = '/^[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,6}$/'; ``` However, this still doesn't resolve the scenario. Additionally, I've tested the regex using PHP's `preg_match` function, and it returns `0` for valid cases, which is puzzling. Is there a standard regex pattern that should be used for email validation in PHP that includes these edge cases? I've looked at several sources, but nothing seems to work correctly for all scenarios. Any insights or recommendations would be greatly appreciated! I recently upgraded to Php latest. Any examples would be super helpful. This is part of a larger microservice I'm building. Is this even possible? Any advice would be much appreciated.