How to parse and normalize U.S. phone number

rubyonrails-talk
1

I have an app that asks a user to enter a 10 digit phone number...

To make things easy for the user, the input field is a single text box.

I'd like to turn whatever the user enters into xxx-xxx-xxxx whether they enter xxxxxxxxxx or (xxx)xxx-xxxx or (xxx)xxxxxx you get the idea...

Is there any code out there that does this already? With so many consumer apps out there, I am sure I'm sure this problem has been solved many times over :slight_smile:

Thanks.

2

This will get you started.

I suggest you store only the digits and pretty it up when you display it, using number_to_phone

3

Indeed. This one does lots of things from dealing with single fields to dealing with three-field UIs. It also allows it to be displayed in a few formats.

It's one of the first Ruby things I wrote, so it's not entirely deconstructed to eliminate all redundancies, and may be some non-idiomatic stuff.

I use this as a composition in my models with supporting code like so:

def phone_number    PhoneNumber.new(super) end

def phone_number=(phone)    super PhoneNumber.new(phone).to_s end

-- gw

class PhoneNumber