What are best practices for validating email addresses on iOS 2.0

Question

What is the cleanest way to validate an email address that a user enters on iOS 2.0?

NOTE: This is a historical question that is specific to iOS 2.0 and due to its age and how many other questions are linked to it it cannot be retired and MUST NOT be changed to a "modern" question.

Answer 1

The answer to Using a regular expression to validate an email address explains in great detail that the grammar specified in RFC 5322 is too complicated for primitive regular expressions.

I recommend a real parser approach like MKEmailAddress.

As quick regular expressions solution see this modification of DHValidation:

- (BOOL) validateEmail: (NSString *) candidate {
    NSString *emailRegex =
@"(?:[a-z0-9!#$%\\&'*+/=?\\^_`{|}~-]+(?:\\.[a-z0-9!#$%\\&'*+/=?\\^_`{|}"
@"~-]+)*|\"(?:[\\x01-\\x08\\x0b\\x0c\\x0e-\\x1f\\x21\\x23-\\x5b\\x5d-\\"
@"x7f]|\\\\[\\x01-\\x09\\x0b\\x0c\\x0e-\\x7f])*\")@(?:(?:[a-z0-9](?:[a-"
@"z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?\\.)+[a-z0-9](?:[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9])?|\\[(?:(?:25[0-5"
@"]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-"
@"9][0-9]?|[a-z0-9-]*[a-z0-9]:(?:[\\x01-\\x08\\x0b\\x0c\\x0e-\\x1f\\x21"
@"-\\x5a\\x53-\\x7f]|\\\\[\\x01-\\x09\\x0b\\x0c\\x0e-\\x7f])+)\\])"; 
    NSPredicate *emailTest = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"SELF MATCHES[c] %@", emailRegex]; 

    return [emailTest evaluateWithObject:candidate];
}