I have a regex email pattern and would like to strip all but pattern-matched characters from the string, in a short I want to sanitize string... I'm not a regex guru, so what I'm missing in regex? <?php $pattern = "/^([\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+\.)*[\w\!\#$\%\&\'\*\+\-\/\=\?\^\`{\|\}\~]+@((((([a-z0-9]{1}[a-z0-9\-]{0,62}[a-z0-9]{1})|[a-z])\.)+[a-z]{2,6})|(\d{1,3}\.){3}\d{1,3}(\:\d{1,5})?)$/i"; $email = 'contact<>@domain.com'; // wrong email $sanitized_email = preg_replace($pattern, NULL, $email); echo $sanitized_email; // Should be [email protected] ?> Pattern taken from: http://fightingforalostcause.net/misc/2006/compare-email-regex.php (the very first one...)