Tip #5 - Cleaning Up an Email Address with Ruby on Rails

So you have an email address field on a form in Rails, but how are you going to make sure that all those users enter a sane and well formatted email address? Here is a simple fix to that problem.

If you read the previous tip then you would have setup some basic validation of the format of your email address.

One thing I didn’t tell you here is that it will also clean up any address you give it.

To show you what I mean, lets try some basics in the console:

TMail::Address.parse('spam@lindsaar.net')
#=> #<TMail::Address spam@lindsaar.net>
TMail::Address.parse('spam@lindsaar.net').to_s
#=> "spam@lindsaar.net"

OK, no surprises there, we give tmail ‘spam@lindsaar.net’ and it returns what we gave it.

But the magic comes when we enter some slightly wrong addresses. What happens if the user accidently adds some spaces:

TMail::Address.parse('spam @ lindsaar . net').to_s
#=> "spam@lindsaar.net"

No problem, TMail sees that it is a basic mistake (though a bit contrived) and handles it.

What else can it handle? Well, lets see:

TMail::Address.parse('"mikel" <spam@lindsaar.net>').to_s
#=> "mikel <spam@lindsaar.net>"
TMail::Address.parse('<spam@lindsaar.net>').to_s
#=> "spam@lindsaar.net"
TMail::Address.parse('Mikel A. <spam@lindsaar.net>').to_s
#=> "\"Mikel A.\" <spam@lindsaar.net>"

OK, the basics are covered.

But, what is nice is that you can choose just to save the email address itself in your database, without the phrase at the front (that is the bit that the owner of the address can put in quotes). You can do this like so:

TMail::Address.parse('Mikel A. <spam@lindsaar.net>').spec
=> "spam@lindsaar.net"

So in your model, you can make a write attribute filter on the “email” attribute of the class you are working on and do something like this:

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  def email=(address)
    write_attribute(:email, TMail::Address.parse(address).spec)
  end
end

Which means the only thing saved in your model will be the actual email address in a known and standard format.

Now, the only problem with this is that when you send an email to your user, you want to put the phrase (the bit at the front with the name) back into the email, that way it shows up as more of a personalized email in their inbox. To do this is quite easy, just whack this in your model (assuming you have a first_name and last_name attribute for your user model):

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  def email
    phrase = %("#{first_name} #{last_name}")
    address = read_attribute(:email)
    "#{phrase} <#{address}>"
  end
end

Now you will always get ‘FirstName LastName <email@domain.com>’ as the address whenever you ask for the email of the person.

Nice hey?

Next tip, validating the email address by domain before saving.

blogLater

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