I want to write a regular expression to match different styles of telephone number

Question

I want to search all the phone numbers in a text. In this text, I found 4 different formats of phone number:

1234567890
123-456-7890
123 456 7890
(123)456-7890

I wrote a regex pattern and try it in python:

\(?\d{3}[\)\s-]?\d{3}[\s-]?\d{4}

This pattern works, I can use it to search all the phone numbers from the text. But, it also matches some wrong format such as "(1234567890", "123)456-7890" and more wrong formats. I am new to regex. Could you please help me to fix this problem? Thanks sincerely.

Try to use [this tool](https://regexr.com/). It's very helpful to work with regular expressions. — André Pacheco, Feb 06 '19 at 02:38
Don't try to match all patterns at once. Make regexes for each and loop over the patterns and see if any match. The hyphens and spaces ones could obviously be combined, though. — Harvey, Feb 06 '19 at 02:59

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 06 '19 at 03:07

0

Here's something that works that you can start with.

numbers = """
1234567890
123-456-7890
123 456 7890
(123)456-7890
(1234567890
 123)456-7890
"""

import re

patterns = [
    r'\d{10}',
    r'\d{3}[ -]\d{3}[ -]\d{4}',
    r'\(\d{3}\)\d{3}-\d{4}',
]
patterns = [re.compile(p) for p in patterns]
results = []
for line in numbers.split('\n'):
    for p in patterns:
        match = p.match(line)
        if match:
            results.append(line)

answered Feb 06 '19 at 03:07

Harvey

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After some research, I found the following pattern works: r"(?P\\()?\d{3}(?(left)\\)\d{3}-\d{4}|(?P[-\s]?)\d{3}(?P=delimiter)\d{4})" – Steven Li Feb 06 '19 at 16:30
@StevenLi Use a verbose regex to document it in your code. – Harvey Feb 06 '19 at 16:46

I want to write a regular expression to match different styles of telephone number

1 Answers1