What does it do?
Validators is a collection of small, ready-made checks that answer simple yes-or-no questions about a piece of text: is this a real-looking email address, is this a properly formatted URL, is this a valid IP address, does this look like a legitimate bank account number. Rather than every developer writing their own fragile pattern-matching rule from scratch, this library packages dozens of common checks into single, well-tested functions. It focuses purely on format and structure, whether something looks correct, not on deeper truths like whether an email address actually receives mail. It’s the kind of unglamorous checkpoint sitting quietly behind almost every form on the internet.
See it in action
This checks whether a piece of text looks like a properly formatted email address or web address, returning true or false for each.
import validators
print(validators.email("someone@example.com"))
print(validators.url("https://example.com"))
print(validators.email("not-an-email"))Why would a non-developer care?
Every time you’ve typed something into a signup form and instantly gotten an error like please enter a valid email address, a check like this ran behind the scenes before your data ever touched a database. Catching obviously malformed input immediately, rather than letting garbage data slip through, prevents a surprising number of downstream headaches.
Real-world examples
Web forms, signup flows, and data-import tools across the internet rely on exactly this kind of validation to catch typos and malformed entries before they cause problems further down the line. Without it, developers write their own regular expressions by hand, a notorious source of subtle bugs like URL patterns that reject valid addresses or accept broken ones.
Who uses it
Web developers building signup forms, data import tools, or APIs that need to catch malformed input before it causes problems.
How it compares to alternatives
For web applications, it overlaps with the built-in validation features of frameworks like Django and WTForms, but validators offers a lighter, framework-independent option for projects that just need standalone checks.