[Rets-dev] Email validation regular expression

[Paul Stusiak]

While JWZ has many witty things to say, I think that there is some 
question of Jaime as the originator of the quote (saw it earlier wrt to 
sed/awk). See

http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247

It is quite a good blog entry from a very experienced person using 
regular expressions where he discusses the quote. You could also check 
out the previous entry http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-14/246. He (JF) 
wrote the MRE (no, not meals ready to eat - Mastering Regular 
Expressions) O'Reilly book - something to while away the hours when 
traveling to the next RETS meeting and an excellent example of technical 
writing. :-) It's hard to believe that it has been ten years since he 
published the first edition. Looks like I'll need to get the updated 
version...

Also note that JWZ is an XEmacs/Lisp person and may have some religious 
issues with regular expressions. Certainly some of the discussions 
around Emacs, Lisp, Ruby and other languages, both in the past and 
currently, should leave no one questioning how real wars start.

The number of places where regular expressions can be used in RETS is 
very small - properly. It is one of the "horses for courses" - pick the 
appropriate tool for the task. We have more tools than a hammer, so we 
don't need to treat everything as a nail. However, where there is a nail 
that needs to be pounded into a board, a hammer is much more useful than 
pounding the nail with a screwdriver or a saw (tried it, wasn't pretty...)

Of course, the "fully compliant" regular expression says volumes about 
the standard (RFC 2822) and less about regular expressions. The RFC 
attempts to make it possible to describe many very, very obsolete email 
addressing schemes. It is something that should weigh heavily on us as 
we develop standards, the balance between backward looking compatibility 
and forward looking uses.

Paul

Keith T. Garner wrote:
> As much as I find regular expressions useful, when I see something like the
> fully compliant regular expression, I have to quote JWZ.
>
> "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think `I know, I'll use
> regular expressions.' Now they have two problems." -- Jamie Zawinski
>
> Keith
>
> Matt Lavallee wrote:
>   
>> Mostly for Paul’s edification, this will pick up all RFC-compliant email
>> addresses:
>>     
[delete long regex]
>> -Matt
>>
>>  
>>
>> pmpt_logo
>>
>> PMPTechnology.com <http://www.pmptechnology.com/>
>>
>> 	
>>
>> *Matt Lavallee*
>> /Manager of Web Services/
>>
>> /phone:/ 630-598-2301
>> /fax:/ 630-982-6641
>>
>>  
>>
>>  
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
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>> Rets-dev at rets.org
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>>     
>
>
>   

-- 
Paul Stusiak
Falcon Technologies Corp.