Regex empty string or email
This regex pattern will match an empty string:
^$
And this will match (crudely) an email or an empty string:
(^$|^.*@.*\..*$)
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 will solve, it will accept empty string or exact an email id
"^$|^([\w\.\-]+)@([\w\-]+)((\.(\w){2,3})+)$"