Validating an email address with PHP

By admin

Steps to validate an email address:

  1. Sanitizing the email address:
  • strtolower($emailAddress);
  • filter_var($emailAddress, FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL); // remove bad characters from the email.
  1. Validating the email adress:
  • filter_var($emailAddress, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);

Note: For email addresses containing Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) you need to convert it to punycode before validating the email address.

<pre class="lang:php decode:true ">function validateEmail($emailAddress) {
  $emailAddress = strtolower($emailAddress);
  $sanitilzedEmail = filter_var($emailAddress, FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);
  if ($emailAddress == $sanitilzedEmail && filter_var($emailAddress, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
    return $emailAddress;
  } else {
    return false;
  }
}