If in fact users are entering the phone numbers you will want to do a much
better
job than this.
perople may or may not put the 1 in front of 800 etc., Letters are often
used for phone numbers, and there maybe be an extension indicated e.g.
1-800-mattress [sic -- there are often "extra" letters that don't matter]
555-1234 ext 666 == 555-1234x666 etc. will would be reformatted to
555-123-4666
This is only for the U.S. -- international numbers make it even more
complex.
How is the database storing these numbers? Just a string of characters?
Is there autodial or not? If not considering leaving the string alone.
Otherwise you risk losing information. A missing digit, especially in the
area
code or exchange portion can often be reconstructed by a person, e.g.
seeing a number such as 61 555-1234 I can guesss I have omitted a 7 when
typing.
Similarly people often enclose the area code in parens, or follow it with a
slash -- they almost
never use these characters after the exchange or before an extension.
Once it passes basic syntax validation
you might want to use a hash to map letters to digits.
I would be interested in perl code that handled formatting phone numbers as
they
actually appear, e.g. in people's .signature lines etc.
Steve
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Uri Guttman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Friday, February 02, 2001 1:49 AM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [Boston.pm] unformatting phone numbers
>
>
> >>>>> "MJB" == Matthew J Brooks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
> MJB> (555) 555-5555
> MJB> 555-555-5555
> MJB> 555.555.5555
> MJB> 555 555-5555
> MJB> ]
>
> MJB> I'd like to stip out the usual garbage that a user
> would enter so
> MJB> I can then reformat it. [Actually it'll be reformatted when it
> MJB> comes out of the database... wouldn't want to waste
> any precious
> MJB> bytes on formatting :)]
>
> MJB> What I'd like to know is can anyone come up with
> something less ugly than
> MJB> this?
>
> MJB> $phone =~ s#(\(|\)|-|\.| )##g;
>
> you need to learn about character classes. this is better and
> faster as
> well:
>
> s/[(). -]//g ;
>
> you can make that more efficient with:
>
> s/[(). -]+//g ;
>
> or even faster with:
>
> tr/(). -//d ;
>
> and it also depends on how strictly you want to filter out garbage.
>
> s/\D+//g ;
>
> will strip out all non-digits.
> so will this and it is faster:
>
> tr/0-9//cd ;
>
> uri
>
> --
> Uri Guttman --------- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------
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