Paul Konstanski
asked on
Is an apostrophe (') in an email address really valid?
I've had over 150,000 people sign up through my server and only today I've encountered my first email address with an apostrophe.
I always thought that o'connor@example.com was invalid. And many of the filters and tests that you run come back showing that is invalid.
But in doing some research about the "technically" allowed characters all indications show that to be a valid. (see wikipedia article).
So is this one of those things that is "on the books" that it is technically okay but in reality no one does it. Gmail doesn't allow it, an online test tool like this doesn't allow it (http://verify-email.org/) and most PHP and JavaScript email validators don't allow it although it looks like angular does (http://www.w3schools.com/angular/tryit.asp?filename=try_ng_validate_required)
So my question is, what's the practical reality. Although permissible, does anybody really do it? I had my first one in over 150,000 entries. Is that how rare it is?
Thanks for any insight you can give.
I always thought that o'connor@example.com was invalid. And many of the filters and tests that you run come back showing that is invalid.
But in doing some research about the "technically" allowed characters all indications show that to be a valid. (see wikipedia article).
So is this one of those things that is "on the books" that it is technically okay but in reality no one does it. Gmail doesn't allow it, an online test tool like this doesn't allow it (http://verify-email.org/) and most PHP and JavaScript email validators don't allow it although it looks like angular does (http://www.w3schools.com/angular/tryit.asp?filename=try_ng_validate_required)
So my question is, what's the practical reality. Although permissible, does anybody really do it? I had my first one in over 150,000 entries. Is that how rare it is?
Thanks for any insight you can give.
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But I'm like you in that in my 40 years of working with computers, I've never seen it. That's why it kind of freaked me out today. There are some database queries that I run that I just don't account for there to be an apostrophe in the email address.
Even the PHP filter validation for email doesn't allow it. http://www.w3schools.com/php/showphp.asp?filename=demo_form_validation_special
Thanks for confirmation of my findings.