preg_match for email address

[HDFilmMaker2112]

Could somebody break down for me what the below actually does? I found the snippet on php.net. I've read up a little bit on reg expressions but it's still a little unclear to me. 

 

I get the [] means don't include that character. But then how does the [a-zA-Z0-9._-] work?

 

preg_match('/^[^@]+@[a-zA-Z0-9._-]+\.[a-zA-Z]+$/', $email)

[reksss]

 

[] - This is the Character class.

 

U must need  to specify all conditions by using [].

 

[a-zA-Z0-9._-]

It means ur allowing any lowercase[a-z], uppercase[A-Z], any numbers[0-9], special characters[._-].

 

 

[HDFilmMaker2112]

Alright what do the plus signs do?

[TeNDoLLA]

Plus sign means 1 or more occurances of [a-zA-Z0-9._-] pattern, then theres \. which means dot before the email ending or extension (.com/org etc), then [a-zA-Z]+$ means alphabets 1 or more at the. [^@] at the start means the email cannot start with @-sign, ^-sign inside pattern is a negation. That is if I remember it correctly. Theres a great regexp tutorial here: http://www.regular-expressions.info/ . It would be much more beneficial for you to understand how they work instead of everytime you face a regular expression you ask people to explain it bit by bit.

 

Don't think thats even a correct regexp for email(?) I might be mistaken also though.