E-mail clean ups - Wildcards and more

Hi, I have a table of user inputed e-mails and a lot of them haven't put correct e-mails in. When I use the
mail(email, blah, blah); command and loop through all of them, it stops on some of them giving me errors.

How would I either:
1. Bypass it so that it doesn't stop on false e-mails
2. Clean up the table and remove e-mails that will stop it.

When i try to run the command "select email from users where email = '%@%';" I get an empty set, even though there are over 500 e-mails in there.

Can someone tell me what an e-mail address requires to be processed correctly? Also, why isn't the wildcard working? Is my syntax correct?

Thanks.

Decius

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You must use LIKE not = when using wildcards. Also, I'd recommend using this pattern "%@%.%"

That should stop mail() from complaining, even if the address isn't valid.

Here's a select that gets all valid (syntactically) email addresses from your table. Whether or not they actually exist, that's another matter....

select * from table
where email regexp '([_.0-9a-z-]+@)([0-9a-z][0-9a-z-]+.)+([a-z]{2,3})';

Thanks. :-)

Works like a charm. One question Kyuzo...
Your select statement allows email addresses such as blah@blah to be passed, without a .com etc.

Is this your intention? Or should I configure it so that it checks for a .com too?

Thanks.

Decius,

Are you sure about that??? I changed an email in one of my tables to blah@blah ;-) and the select statement didn't pull it out. The final part of the regular expression ( the .)+([a-z]{2,3})'; stuff...) should check for a .com, .org, .net, .jp, .de, dot just about anything. Give it a shot again and let me know if it doesn't work -- I'll be surprised if it doesn't....

Regards,

Kyuzo