Regex empty string or email

matching empty string or email

(^$|^[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.(?:[a-zA-Z]{2}|com|org|net|edu|gov|mil|biz|info|mobi|name|aero|asia|jobs|museum)$)

matching empty string or email but also matching any amount of whitespace

(^\s*$|^[a-zA-Z0-9._%+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9.-]+\.(?:[a-zA-Z]{2}|com|org|net|edu|gov|mil|biz|info|mobi|name|aero|asia|jobs|museum)$)

see more about the email matching regex itself:

http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html

The answers above work ($ for empty), but I just tried this and it also works to just leave empty like so:

/\A(INTENSE_EMAIL_REGEX|)\z/i

Same thing in reverse order

/\A(|INTENSE_EMAIL_REGEX)\z/i

This regex pattern will match an empty string:

^$

And this will match (crudely) an email or an empty string:

(^$|^.*@.*\..*$)