[Rets-dev] Email validation regular expression

[Matt Lavallee]

On Wednesday, April 25, 2007 at 4:34 PM, Paul Stusiak wrote:

> 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.

Indeed.  And, as a matter of practicality, we (business front-ends) don't want an address like "me at here" being allowed to touch our databases, even though it is perfectly valid.  However, we (the transport standard) should be /very/ forgiving about establishing rules around the transfer of data... unless we can unequivocally state that _every_ valid value for the field can be transmitted, we should not risk denying *meaningful* data through the system.

For example, *I* have no problem saying that "year built" should be a fairly strict numeric field (say, 1700+), however, my MLS has it as a string... with results such as "100+", "1430", "01/2", "04/2" coloring the 300 distinct values in today's data.  Now, are those 4500 "NEW" values valid?  No.  Would I still want them passed to my clients?  Absolutely.

-Matt