Perl5 vs Awk: what's the problem in this regex?

[pe...@firstbs.com]

Hi there,

I'm not an experienced 'regex-er', so don't laugh when you see my pattern :-)

I tried to use a regex to match valid e-mail addresses. I used:

((\w+\.\w+|\w+)+)\@((\w+\.\w+|\w+)+)

I tried this with Perl5 matching on the e-mail address:

whats.going.on@someplace123.co.uk

and it failed. When I tried Awk matching however, it succeeds.

Why is this? I would expect the behaviour to be the same and for the regex to
match the e-mail address above.

Any idea why it doesn't work for Perl5?

Thanks,

Peter.


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