Parsing, validating and creating phone numbers

You can install the phone library as a gem

gem sources -a http://gemcutter.org
gem install phone

Or as a Rails plugin

script/plugin install git://github.com/carr/phone.git

The biggest updating is the namespacing problem fixed that a lot of people were having. You now use phone by refering to

Phoner::Phone

You can initialize a new phone object with the number, area code, country code and extension number

Phoner::Phone.new('5125486', '91', '385')

or

Phoner::Phone.new(:number => '5125486', :area_code => '91', :country_code => '385', :extension => '143')

You can create a new phone object by parsing from a string. Phoner::Phone does it’s best to detect the country and area codes:

Phoner::Phone.parse '+385915125486'
Phoner::Phone.parse '00385915125486'

If the country or area code isn’t given in the string, you must set it, otherwise it doesn’t work:

Phoner::Phone.parse '091/512-5486', :country_code => '385'
Phoner::Phone.parse '(091) 512 5486', :country_code => '385'

If you feel that it’s tedious, set the default country code once (in your config/environment.rb):

Phoner::Phone.default_country_code = '385'    
Phoner::Phone.parse '091/512-5486'
Phoner::Phone.parse '(091) 512 5486'

Same goes for the area code:

Phoner::Phone.parse '451-588', :country_code => '385', :area_code => '47'

or

Phoner::Phone.default_country_code = '385'  
Phoner::Phone.default_area_code = '47'

Phoner::Phone.parse '451-588'

Like it’s stated above, Phone does it’s best to automatically detect the country and area code while parsing. Do do this, phone uses data stored in data/countries.yml.

Each country code can have a regular expression named area_code that describes how the area code for that particular country looks like.

If an area_code regular expression isn’t specified, the default, Phoner::Phone::DEFAULT_AREA_CODE (correct for the US) is used.

Validating is very relaxed, basically it strips out everything that’s not a number or ‘+’ character:

Phoner::Phone.valid? 'blabla 091/512-5486 blabla'

Formating is done via the format method. The method accepts a Symbol or a String.

When given a string, it interpolates the string with the following fields:

• %c - country_code (385)

• %a - area_code (91)

• %A - area_code with leading zero (091)

• %n - number (5125486)

• %f - first @@n1_length characters of number (configured through Phoner::Phone.n1_length), default is 3 (512)

• %l - last characters of number (5486)

• %x - the extension number

  pn = Phoner::Phone.parse('+385915125486')
  pn.to_s # => "+385915125486"
  pn.format("%A/%f-%l") # => "091/512-5486"
  pn.format("+ %c (%a) %n") # => "+ 385 (91) 5125486"
  

When given a symbol it is used as a lookup for the format in the Phoner::Phone.named_formats hash.

pn.format(:europe) # => "+385 (0) 91 512 5486"
pn.format(:us) # => "(234) 123 4567"
pn.format(:default_with_extension) # => "+3851234567x143"

You can add your own custom named formats like so:

Phoner::Phone.named_formats[:short] = '%A/%n1-%n2'    
pn.format(:short) # => 091/512-5486

If you don’t have the country code, but you know from other sources what country a phone is from, you can retrieve the country using the country isocode (such as ‘de’, ‘es’, ‘us’, …).

if country = Phoner::Country.find_by_country_isocode(user_country_isocode)
  phone_number = Phoner::Phone.parse(user_input, :country_code => country.country_code)
end

You have to remember to run Phoner::Country.load method before though.

Parse testing for different countries.

Currently tested on:

AU

Australia

BA

Bosnia and Herzegovina

BE

Belgium

DE

Germany

ES

Spain

FR

France

GB

United Kingdom

HR

Croatia

HU

Hungary

NL

Netherlands

RS

Serbia

SE

Sweden

SI

Slovenia

UA

Ukraine

US

United States

ZA

South Africa

There’s an issue with Germany and Spanish area codes.

Copyright © 2010 Tomislav Car, Infinum

Don Morrison, Michael Squires, Todd Eichel (Fooala, Inc.), chipiga, Etienne Samson, Luke Randall, Jakob Hilden, Tieg Zaharia