Email Validation in JavaScript
There are numerous solutions out there for validating an email address in JavaScript, depending on how strict you want to be with your validation. In this tutorial, you'll learn about 3 different options and the tradeoffs between them.
Write Your Own Regular Expression
The quick and easy approach is to write a regular expression that validates whether a string is a correctly formatted
email address. One simple approach I've used in the past is checking if the string looks like xx@yy.zz:
/^[^@]+@\w+(\.\w+)+\w$/.test(str);This regular expression is fairly concise and handles many common cases. If you don't need to be especially strict about validation, this regexp can be helpful.
/^[^@]+@\w+(\.\w+)+\w$/.test('foo@bar.co'); // true
/^[^@]+@\w+(\.\w+)+\w$/.test('foo.bar@baz.co'); // true
/^[^@]+@\w+(\.\w+)+\w$/.test('foo@bar.c'); // false, TLD must be at least 2 chars
/^[^@]+@\w+(\.\w+)+\w$/.test('foo@bar'); // false
/^[^@]+@\w+(\.\w+)+\w$/.test('bar.co'); // falseHowever, there are many rules that the above regular expression doesn't account for. For example, the "personal info"
part of an email address (everything before '@') cannot contain square braces []. There are
more sophisticated regexps that handle most of the edge cases,
for example:
/^[-!#$%&'*+\/0-9=?A-Z^_a-z`{|}~](\.?[-!#$%&'*+\/0-9=?A-Z^_a-z`{|}~])*@[a-zA-Z0-9](-*\.?[a-zA-Z0-9])*\.[a-zA-Z](-?[a-zA-Z0-9])+$/However, this regular expression still doesn't handle all edge cases. For example, the personal info part of the email address cannot be more than 64 characters. Because of this, writing your own email validation regexp is typically not a good choice, unless you're certain you only want a quick spot check as to whether an email is valid.
2. Use an npm Module
The email-validator npm module is a more robust check for whether a string is a syntactically valid email address. It handles several rules that regular expressions can't check, for example:
const { validate } = require('email-validator');
validate('foo@bar.co'); // true
validate('this-personal-info-is-too-long-it-must-be-less-than-64-characters@bar.co'); // falseThe email-validator module is a great choice most of the time. It handles the complex regular expressions and various rules so you don't have to. You should use email-validator or something similar, unless you have a compelling reason to write your own regular expression.
3. Use an API
Regular expressions and email-validator only check the syntax of the email address, not if it is an actual email
address. For example, foo@bar.baz is a syntactically valid email address, but sending an email to that address from
Mailgun will fail because baz is not a valid TLD.
There are several APIs for validating email addresses, like Mailgun and Kickbox. These APIs perform additional validation by talking to the actual mail server and verifying that the email exists.
For example, here's how you can use Axios to validate an email against Kickbox's validation API:
const email = 'notexist@karpov.io';
const apiKey = 'your key here';
const res = await axios.get('https://api.kickbox.com/v2/verify', { params: { email, apiKey } });
res.data.result; // 'undeliverable', because the email address doesn't existThese APIs are also not foolproof: some mail servers don't allow tools like Mailgun or Kickbox to check whether an individual email address exists, to block email scraping. However, if you want to make absolutely certain that users are signing up with valid emails, and you're willing to pay to maximize deliverability, using an API is a good choice.