You can use the filter_var() function, which gives you a lot of handy validation and sanitization options.
filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)
Available in PHP >= 5.2.0
If you don't want to change your code that relied on your function, just do:
function isValidEmail($email){
return filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) !== false;
}
Note: For other uses (where you need Regex), the deprecated ereg function family (POSIX Regex Functions) should be replaced by the preg family (PCRE Regex Functions). There are a small amount of differences, reading the Manual should suffice.
Update 1: As pointed out by @binaryLV:
PHP 5.3.3 and 5.2.14 had a bug related to FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL, which resulted in segfault when validating large values. Simple and safe workaround for this is using
strlen()beforefilter_var(). I'm not sure about 5.3.4 final, but it is written that some 5.3.4-snapshot versions also were affected.
This bug has already been fixed.
Update 2: This method will of course validate bazmega@kapa as a valid email address, because in fact it is a valid email address. But most of the time on the Internet, you also want the email address to have a TLD: [email protected]. As suggested in this blog post (link posted by @Istiaque Ahmed), you can augment filter_var() with a regex that will check for the existence of a dot in the domain part (will not check for a valid TLD though):
function isValidEmail($email) {
return filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)
&& preg_match('/@.+\./', $email);
}
As @Eliseo Ocampos pointed out, this problem only exists before PHP 5.3, in that version they changed the regex and now it does this check, so you do not have to.