Help Needed to parse phone numbers

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I would like to build up a script, here goes the requirement:

- Pull phone number ( 662-5555) from a phone attribute value looking something like this :

OfficePhoneNumber:  662-5555,+1 102 892-1314
[download]

The script should work under following circumstances :

> If two values, then the pull first value (i.e 662-5555 i in above ca
+se) .
> If one value, then if the phone number is of the form   xxx-xxxx  th
+en pull this (662-5555 ).
> Else, no officePhoneNumber value.
[download]

Any help is appreciated.

Regards, Prince

Code and p tags added by GrandFather

2009-05-05 Retitled by GrandFather, as per Monastery guidelines

Comment on Help Needed to parse phone numbers Select or Download Code

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Re: Help Needed to parse phone numbers by planetscape (Chancellor) on May 05, 2009 at 04:00 UTC
Regexp::Common may be of use, or you may also find phone number regexes by searching the Regular Expression Library. HTH, planetscape	[reply]
Re: Help Needed to parse phone numbers by GrandFather (Saint) on May 05, 2009 at 02:59 UTC
So what's stopping you? What have you tried? Where are you having trouble? True laziness is hard work	[reply]
Re: Help Needed to parse phone numbers by Corion (Patriarch) on May 05, 2009 at 06:25 UTC
Also see Beast of the Number: Parsing the Feral Phone	[reply]
Re: Help Needed to parse phone numbers by paulchernoch (Acolyte) on May 05, 2009 at 14:22 UTC
In my experience, capturing all possible variants of phone numbers in a single regex is impossible, so I would use a battery of expressions. I assume that if multiple phone numbers are found in your record, that they are separated by commas. This code should do the trick. Note that I used ^ and $ in the expressions, because the office phone pattern is a proper subset of the international pattern, and both numbers match the office pattern if I do not insist that the pattern matches the whole string. Sometimes you need to sort your patterns carefully according to priority if multiple patterns match the same string. #!/usr/bin/perl my @office_patterns = ('^\d{3}-\d{4}$'); my @international_patterns = ('^[+]\d \d{3} \d{3}-\d{4}$'); my $record = "OfficePhoneNumber: 662-5555,+1 102 892-1314"; my ($field, $data) = split(/:\s/, $record); my @office_phones; my @international_phones; NUMBER: foreach $number (split(/,\s/, $data)) { # Trim spaces. $number =~ s/^\s+//; $number =~ s/\s+$//; foreach $office_pattern (@office_patterns) { if ($number =~ /$office_pattern/) { push @office_phones, $number; next NUMBER; } } foreach $international_pattern (@international_patterns) { if ($number =~ /$international_pattern/) { push @international_phones, $number; next NUMBER; } } } print "Office #: ", join(", ", @office_phones), "\n"; print "International #: ", join(", ", @international_phones), "\n"; [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Help Needed to parse phone numbers by Anonymous Monk on May 18, 2009 at 18:10 UTC
Thanks for the script. I have modified the script a bit as per my need. However, one thing I dont want which the script is doing. The script is picking up "662-5555" even if it is at second place like, my $record = "OfficePhoneNumber: ,+1 102 892-1314,662-5555"; Ideally, if "662-5555" is at the second place, the script should ignore it. Can you help me in this? Regards, Prince	[reply]