[IUG] Regular Expression for bad email addresses

["Boggs, John" <boggs at plsinfo dot org>]

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> 



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