What is the format of email header "name <email>"?

Question

Hi,

What is the official format of

name <email>

in email headers? I need to validate user input before pasting it into my headers.

Also, do you happen to know good Regular Expressions to validate that form of name+email pair?

Answer 1

Enjoy.

Search stackoverflow for regexes to parse email addresses, you'll quickly see it's futile.

You should probably just do some basic sanity checking and actually attempt to email the name, address pair as you main way of checking if the email is valid.

Answer 2

See http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html and RFC822. The email format is somewhat complex ;)

The Perl compatible regexp for email addresses is:

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)+|\Z|(?=[\["()<>@,;:\\".\[\]]))|"(?:[^\"\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*"(?:(?:
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.(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:[^()<>@,;:\\".\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])+|\Z
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