Many are tempted to try to eliminate many frequently-invalid
mail addresses with a simple regex, such as
-C</^[\w.-]+\@([\w.-]+\.)+\w+$/>. It's a very bad idea. However,
+C</^[\w.-]+\@(?:[\w-]+\.)+\w+$/>. It's a very bad idea. However,
this also throws out many valid ones, and says nothing about
-potential deliverability, so is not suggested. Instead, see
-http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/Tom_Christiansen/scripts/ckaddr.gz ,
+potential deliverability, so it is not suggested. Instead, see
+http://www.perl.com/CPAN/authors/Tom_Christiansen/scripts/ckaddr.gz,
which actually checks against the full RFC spec (except for nested
comments), looks for addresses you may not wish to accept mail to
(say, Bill Clinton or your postmaster), and then makes sure that the
=head2 How do I decode a MIME/BASE64 string?
-The MIME-tools package (available from CPAN) handles this and a lot
-more. Decoding BASE64 becomes as simple as:
+The MIME-Base64 package (available from CPAN) handles this as well as
+the MIME/QP encoding. Decoding BASE64 becomes as simple as:
- use MIME::base64;
+ use MIME::Base64;
$decoded = decode_base64($encoded);
-A more direct approach is to use the unpack() function's "u"
+The MIME-Tools package (available from CPAN) supports extraction with
+decoding of BASE64 encoded attachments and content directly from email
+messages.
+
+If the string to decode is short (less than 84 bytes long)
+a more direct approach is to use the unpack() function's "u"
format after minor transliterations:
tr#A-Za-z0-9+/##cd; # remove non-base64 chars