he lost my attention with this: > I genuinely - and possibly misguidedly - believe that even something like ^\w+([-+.']\w+)*@\w+([-.]\w+)*\.\w+([-.]\w+)*$

he lost my attention with this: > I genuinely - and possibly misguidedly - believe that even something like ^\w+([-+.']\w+)*@\w+([-.]\w+)*\.\w+([-.]\w+)*$ > might just as well be written in BrainFuck. all those \w & \W's? c'mon, that's the easiest RE parsing task you could possibly confront! it is really difficult to look at RE expressions, but it's also really hard to think of a better way