Are email addresses allowed to contain non-alphanumeric characters?

Email address consists of two parts local before @ and domain that goes after.

Rules to these parts are different:

For local part you can use ASCII:

  • Latin letters A – Z a – z
  • digits 0 – 9
  • special characters !#$%&’*+-/=?^_`{|}~
  • dot ., that it is not first or last, and not in sequence
  • space and “(),:;<>@[] characters are allowed with restrictions (they are only allowed inside a quoted string, a backslash or double-quote must be preceded by a backslash)

Plus since 2012 you can use international characters above U+007F, encoded as UTF-8.

Domain part is more restricted:

  • Latin letters A – Z a – z
  • digits 0 – 9
  • hyphen -, that is not first or last, multiple hyphens in sequence are allowed.

Regex to validate

^(([^<>()\[\]\.,;:\s@\"]+(\.[^<>()\[\]\.,;:\s@\"]+)*)|(\".+\"))@(([^<>()[\]\.,;:\s@\"]+\.)+[^<>()[\]\.,;:\s@\"]{2,})

Hope this saves you some time.

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