I've got a very simple problem, I just can't figure out how to write it correcty. I want to test for inputted text and also an "@" symbol in the email field. Here's the code I've tried:

if(!empty($_POST['name']) &&
($_POST['email']) &&
($_POST['phone']))
and (strstr( $email, "@"))
{

But I'm getting the error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_LOGICAL_AND

I'm sure it's very simple to fix, any idea guys?

Cheers

Why is there an 'and' instead of a &&?

A better way to check for an email is as follows.

There's a problem in your brackets and logic

try:

Thanks for the replies.

Jason, my php is basic and I don't really understand what any of that means, and I prefer not to use code I don't understand.

Rakuli, I get a syntax error with your code on this line:

strstr($_POST['email']), '@') &&

Any idea why?

Woops sorry mate, have amended my above post

pregmatch() looks for for something within a string.



This is a regular expression. Regular expressions is a syntax used to find character combinations. They are complicated but I will try to break it down for you.

Take the email's someone@gmail.com and dave@hotmail.co.uk

/^ - Start of string
[a-z0-9\å\ä\ö._-] - Look for any valid character's. a-z, 0-9, as well as the other characters specified. (someone, dave)

+@[a-z0-9\å\ä\ö.-] - Look for the @ sign and any other valid characters. (@gmail, @hotmail)

+\.[a-z]{2,6}$/i - Add a '.' then any a-z characters. The {2,6} specifies that this should be between 2-6 characters long. (.com, .co.uk)

So basically this confirms that the e-mail address contains.. [something]@[something].[something which is 2-6 characters long]

You are currently looking for an @ sign. This means that if someone just enters @ it will validate. This is no good.

There is a cheat sheet for regular expressions here.
http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/regular_ex...cheat_sheet.png

Just a little encouragement for "PHP beginners".... Don't let regular expressions scare you off. I know they look like big scary, cryptic, jumbled runes, but investing a little time and effort to learn the basics is worth it!!! REGEX is a very powerful tool, and not only implemented in PHP.

This site has a very nice tutorial and some simple examples: http://www.regular-expressions.info/

And I can't resist sharing this: http://xkcd.com/208/

That just made the geeky side of me so happy. Great link

This doesn't seem the best idea to me. What if the person has the email address.

studentname@student.rmit.edu.au

Which just so you know is how most of the Universities in Australia have their email addresses.

yes the studentname@student. part will validate however the rmit.edu.au is certainly longer than 2-6 characters. I'd make sure it can accept at least 2-20 characters. Remember that rmit is the uni name and it might be a fair bit longer.

This post has been edited by Itsumishi: May 13 2008, 08:51 PM

This is the regex i use for validating emails:

would also match "studentname@student.rmit.edu.au"

and, btw, there isn't a perfect regex for validating emails..... the only failsafe way is to query the server is this address exists and that is usually way too complicated

How about requiring email confirmation? If I have to be sure that the email is "real", I send a confirmation email to that address and the user needs to validate it by clicking the link on that email. Only after that I accept the new email address. I think that's used pretty much so users can expect it and it's fairly easy to do.

Yep, also a good idea.... But a quick email verification before allowing the form to submit prevents people or bots from spamming with "asdf...." It just makes sure that the characters they entered are a valid address.....

If you want to prevent spambots from using the form then there are other solutions available, for example this one which is also used by Twitter.

I'm not talking about spam bots... I'm talking about real people who don't even bother to enter an email address with the correct format.... I know this isn't much, but it's just one more precaution one can take....

Ok, Then you propably don't have any other real solution than just use regex to match the email. Email confirmation is not good in this situation. Better with user accounts.