Re: [IUG] Regular Expression for bad email addresses

["Stephen McLaughlin" <sMcLaughlin at sfpl dot org>]

I used the following search, which seemed to work as expected (unless
I'm missing something, not at all unlikely):

Term 1: PATRON E-MAIL ADDRESS MATCHES \.[a-z]{4,20}$
Term 2: OR PATRON E-MAIL ADDRESS MATCHES \.[a-z]$

This got me addresses with either one letter, or four plus letters,
after the last period. I suppose I should change the bracketed terms to
[a-z0-9] to include numbers. What this won't get is non-alpha,
non-numeric characters. But the search has certainly turned up some
problem records I need to fix....

Steve McLaughlin
San Francisco Public Library

On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 7:12 PM, Boggs, John <boggs at plsinfo dot org> wrote:

> I'm working on a regular expression in Create Lists, and it's not
> behaving how I expect it to.  I'm not sure who's having the brain-dead
> moment:  Me or Millennium.
>
>
>
> I'm looking for email addresses that don't have either a 2 or three
> character extension.  (.com, .edu, .tv)  I came up with the following:
>
>
>
> PATRON  Email  matches  "[^.]...$"    AND PATRON  Email  matches
> "[^.]..$"
>
>
>
> My expectation was any email address with 4 non-dot characters at the
> end would show up.  I did get .coom and such, but I also got plenty of
> .com and .edu addresses.  So I added <space>* to the end of my
> expressions, thinking that if there were spaces there that might be
> messing up my search.  No luck - I got the same set.
>
>
>
> I also just now tried [^.]{4}$, and I get even *more* perfectly fine
> addresses, that do have a dot within the last 4 characters.
>
>
>
> Am I missing something in my expressions?  Or is Millennium not
parsing
> my expression properly?  (Or maybe there's data stored at the end of
the
> field that we can't see...)
>
>
>
> Thanks for any insight!  I'm stumped today.
>
>
>
> John D. Boggs, PLAN Database Manager
> Peninsula Library System
> 2471 Flores Street
> San Mateo, CA  94403-2273
> (650)571-6799 x3062
> boggs at plsinfo dot org <blocked::mailto:boggs at plsinfo dot org>