Developing a simple validation library in JavaScript

There exists several ways to deal with validation of email addresses.  One of the most popular methods involves using “regular expressions”.  The discussion of “regular expressions” is beyond the scope of this article and I suggest you investigate by searching online.

Now, let us try to develop a simple script (JavaScript) to validate email addresses.  Take a look at the following code: 

Within the above code, I mainly created a simple text box and a button.  The textbox is named “txtEMail” and the button is named “Button1”.  The button is defined with an “onclick” event which calls a JavaScript function named  “Button1_onclick”, which is defined as follows:

function Button1_onclick() {
var v = document.all("txtEMail").value;
alert(isValidEmail(v));
}

The above function defines a variable “v”, which is assigned with a value available (or typed) in the textbox “txtEMail”.  The same variable is passed as a parameter to another JavaScript function, “isValidEmail” (which is defined as follows).  The value returned by the function “isValidEmail” is finally displayed in the form of a message box, using an “alert” statement.  Now, let us look into “isValidEmail” function.

function isValidEmail(val){
    var re = /^[\w-]+(\.[\w-]+)*@([\w-]+\.)+[a-zA-Z]{2,7}$/;
    if (!val.match(re)) {
        return false;
    } else {
        return true;
    }
}

The first statement within the above function is the “regular expression” which is used to check for the validity of an email address.  JavaScript contains a method “match” (for a string object) especially to deal with “regular expressions”.

Any comments, suggestions, ideas, improvements, bugs, errors, feedback etc. are highly appreciated at jag_chat@yahoo.com.