Can someone explain this regex

Question

I know this is a pretty basic regex, could someone explain what it is doing please?

^[^@]+@[-a-z0-9.]+$

Answer 1

It says "match one or more non-@ character followed by an @, followed by one or more alphanumeric characters, a - or a ." The ^ at the beginning and the $ at the end signify this pattern must also be against the beginning and end of the entire string (^ means "beginning of string" and $ means "end of string").

Answer 2

Matches a string that doesn't start with at least 1 @ character, followed by matching a @, then a -, . or any alphanumeric characters at least once.

I'm guessing it's a very loose email validator.

Answer 3

^ - match start of string

[^@]+ - match one or more characters that aren't an @

@ - match an @

[-a-z0-9.]+ - match one or more characters from the set '-', lower case 'a'-'z', the digits '0'-'9', '.'

$ - match end of string

So, match any string that consists of some characters that aren't '@', followed by '@', followed by some number of lower case letters / digits / dashes / full stops.

Answer 4

To expand upon Rex's answer, it looks like a naive email validation regex.

Answer 5

I think it's trying to match an email address (not very well)

Example matches:

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• hello(world)@9
• a[]&^&£^$^&£@.