Servage Magazine

I’ve seen the weirdest things among website developers, on how they try to validate an email address. Everything from highly complex if/else combinations to impossible regular expressions. However, it’s really easy to validate an email address with PHP, because there is a built-in function. Why do so many people not know that? So… I say it once more: There is a built in function to validate email addresses in PHP :-)

$email = "someone@exa mple.com";

if(!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
  echo "E-mail is not valid";
}
else {
  echo "E-mail is valid";
}

You can even put it inside a functions or an object method. I have attached it as an object method in the example below:

$email = "someone@exa mple.com";

class Person {
  var $email;
  function setEmail($email) {
    if(!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
      $this->email = $email;
      return true;
  }
  else {
    return false;
  }

$person = new Person;
if ($person->setEmail('test@me.com'))
  echo 'Valid email set';
else
  echo 'Invalid email. Not set.';

It’s as easy as that to validate email addresses in PHP. Read more about filters here.