Advice on parsing e-mail addresses: don't. It's a lot more complex than it looks at first glance. The only regex capable of getting it anywhere close to right is a few hundred characters long, and that doesn't even get embedded comments.

Instead, use Email::Valid (which contains that massive regex already) to check if the address conforms to RFC 822 (which defines the format for e-mail addresses), then use a simple /(.*)/ to untaint it if it passes (that is, if you really have to untaint it).

Update: About the code you wrote above--you're not capturing any data in the regex, so $1 and $2 won't be intitilized. For future referance, you need to do something like:

if($str =~ /([\w\.]+)\@([\w\.]+)/) {
    $untainted = "$1\@$2";
}
[download]

But my comments above still apply.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated

thanks i will look into how to use that, looks pretty simple...
jcpunk

by the way thanks for all the help that was, is, and will be

You aren't capturing anything with parens in your regex. So, $1 and $2 are always empty.

BTW, a regex for valid emails will be much more complex than yours.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

indeed, thanks for looking into that, im thinkin the valid email modules sounds kinda nice (one post up for the link)
jcpunk

by the way thanks for all the help that was, is, and will be

if ($tainted =~ / ^              # don't start mid-string
                  \s*            # skip any leading space
                  (\w{3}[\w.]*)  # prefix to $1
                  \@
                  ([\w.]+)       # hostname to $2
                  \s*            # skip any trailing space
                  $ /x)          # don't end mid-string
    { $untainted = "$1\@$2"; }
[download]

--
[ e d @ h a l l e y . c c ]

thank you very much for the time you put into that
jcpunk

by the way thanks for all the help that was, is, and will be

if ($tainted =~ /(\w{3}[\w.]*)\@([\w.]+)/){
  $untainted = "$1\@$2";
}
[download]

thanks, for that i apprecate the help
jcpunk

by the way thanks for all the help that was, is, and will be