Validating phone number in php

Question

Possible Duplicate:
A comprehensive regex for phone number validation

please i created this function for mail and phone number validation, the mail own works, bt the phone own does nt work.

if(trim($_POST['email']) == '')  {
    $hasError = true;
} else if (!eregi("^[A-Z0-9._%-]+@[A-Z0-9._%-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$",     
         trim($_POST['email']))) {
    $hasError = true;
} else {
    $email = trim($_POST['email']);
}

if(trim($_POST['phonenumber']) == '')  {
    $hasError = true;
} else if (!eregi("/^\(?(\d{3})\)?[- ]?(\d{3})[- ]?(\d{4})$/$",      
          trim($_POST['phonenumber']))) {
    $hasError = true;
} else {
    $phonenumber= trim($_POST['phonenumber']);
}

Is it the trailing `$/$'? Try changing it to just `$` and see if that works.... — andrewsi, Jun 21 '12 at 16:44
`ereg` functions are deprecated. See [`preg`](http://il.php.net/manual/en/book.pcre.php). Also, please clearly define what a valid phone number is. — Madara's Ghost, Jun 21 '12 at 16:45

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 21 '12 at 16:47

0

Firstly, you should be using preg_match instead of eregi.

Aside from that, people enter phone numbers in a variety of ways. The easiest way to handle them is to strip out anything that isn't a digit, and see if you have ten digits:

$number = preg_replace("/\D/","",$_POST['phonenumber']);
if( strlen($number) == 10) { /* ok */ }
else { /* error */ }

answered Jun 21 '12 at 16:47

Niet the Dark Absol

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`+972 52 1234567` is a valid phone number. – Madara's Ghost Jun 21 '12 at 16:48
True, but I was assuming the question was only accepting US phone numbers, owing the lack of any attempt to handle country codes. – Niet the Dark Absol Jun 21 '12 at 16:50
i do want it to accept all numbers – Chistel Brown Jnr Jun 21 '12 at 16:52
In that case, just strip out anything that isn't a digit. After all, you can't type anything but digits into a phone's keypad. – Niet the Dark Absol Jun 21 '12 at 16:52

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 21 '12 at 17:01

I think a better way to do it would be to strip all non-numeric characters from the input and check that the length is within a certain range. Especially if you're storing this data in a database so you don't end up storing unnecessary data.

You might want to leave the x character in if you want to allow extensions. Here's a function to remove all non-digit characters from a string (except x).

function removeNonNumeric($string) {
    return preg_replace('/[^\dx]/', '', $string)
}

When you need to output the result, you can format it however you want.

Validating phone number in php

2 Answers2