What’s the best way to validate an email address in JavaScript?

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Using regular expressions is probably the best way. You can see a bunch of tests here (taken from chromium)

const validateEmail = (email) => {
  return String(email)
    .toLowerCase()
    .match(
      /^(([^<>()[\]\\.,;:\s@"]+(\.[^<>()[\]\\.,;:\s@"]+)*)|(".+"))@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\])|(([a-zA-Z\-0-9]+\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,}))$/
    );
};

Here’s the example of a regular expression that accepts unicode:

const re =
  /^(([^<>()[\]\.,;:\s@\"]+(\.[^<>()[\]\.,;:\s@\"]+)*)|(\".+\"))@(([^<>()[\]\.,;:\s@\"]+\.)+[^<>()[\]\.,;:\s@\"]{2,})$/i;

But keep in mind that one should not rely only upon JavaScript validation. JavaScript can easily be disabled. This should be validated on the server side as well.

Here’s an example of the above in action:

const validateEmail = (email) => {
  return email.match(
    /^(([^<>()[\]\\.,;:\s@\"]+(\.[^<>()[\]\\.,;:\s@\"]+)*)|(\".+\"))@((\[[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,3}\])|(([a-zA-Z\-0-9]+\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,}))$/
  );
};

const validate = () => {
  const $result = $('#result');
  const email = $('#email').val();
  $result.text('');

  if (validateEmail(email)) {
    $result.text(email + ' is valid :)');
    $result.css('color', 'green');
  } else {
    $result.text(email + ' is not valid :(');
    $result.css('color', 'red');
  }
  return false;
}

$('#email').on('input', validate);

And this is the html:

<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.1.1/jquery.min.js"></script>

<label for="email">Enter an email address: </label>
<input id="email" />
<h2 id="result"></h2>

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