Checking if an email is valid should be easy, right? WRONG.
This took about 3-4 hours to finally get. I scoured the web for a good email validation function. But, I was unable to find any that actually handled all the valid email variations.
If you didn't know, the spec for email is actually pretty complex. It allows a lot more than just a web-safe prefix and a domain sandwiched between an @ symbol. You can use quotes, brackets, escapes, and more @ symbols.
Looking at the results that Wikipedia gives me for emails that should fail or pass a validation, I knew this would require more than just a simple pattern match.
Here is the final product. I added some nice comments to explain some of the rules as well.
You can see there is a lot more logic than expected. I also made this function have multiple returns.
If the email passes the function returns true and nil, but if it fails, it will return nil and the reason that the validation failed. Pretty slick!
Anyway, this was a tedious task. So go forth and leverage my pain in your next form submission.
