Am I the only person who thinks that things like this are totally unnecessary? Is learning/reading regular expressions really that difficult for most people? N

Am I the only person who thinks that things like this are totally unnecessary? Is learning/reading regular expressions really that difficult for most people? No, you're not the only one. I have a feeling that things like that massive regular expression that is meant to match RFC822 email addresses is part of the reason for the focus on this kind of "easy to use, human" regular expression interfaces. The problem is that that email matching regular expression is an extreme case that matches a whole bunch of things that MTAs/MUAs need to know about, but that most people, who are accepting email addresses in web forms, don't need to know about, like "email comments", the real name fields, bang paths, etc. 99.999% of email addresses are going to match something simple like ^\S+@[\w-.]+\.[\w-]+$, and you're going to pass that off to the MTA to parse and validate and bounce anyway. For example, most people should be more concerned with having decent bounce processing support rather than trying to make email address matching regular expressions.