Sorry in advance, but this probably won't be the best answer you could get, (but hey, i'm reasonably drunk now so..)

Zen teaches that it is as important to understand what you cannot be aware of as that which you can.

Hence, it seems to me that the problem is not your regexs, that you are trying not only to match two different sets of numbers, whilst relying on normal people to apply a convention to the numbers. This is not something you can guarantee.

Perhaps try to preprocess the number within the file to the standards you expect to see, in order to differeniate between prices and telephone numbers. It is, I believe, unlikely that a telephone number (in terms of numerical value) could be mistaken for a price, or vice versa (in terms of currency notation).

damn I just re-read that, and although I stand by my advice, doesn't it sound pretentious? :P

Although to be fair, I ain't a programmer. But the reason bioinformaticians use PERL is essentially just because of the excellent regexes.

In reply to Re: pricing and phone number regexes by karmacide
in thread pricing and phone number regexes by coldfingertips

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