HowTo search a string for content?

rubyonrails-talk
1

Obviously not a genius with Ruby.

I simply want to check if the string from an form input is a phone number, or an email.

I started testing wether the string.class was Bignum or Fixnum. If it was I presumed it was a phonenumber. Although this works in script/ console, my application dosn't seem to pass the Bignum and Fixnum tests and proceeds to the else statement.

So now I wanna try looking for the content in my string.

I thought, hey, ill just look for the "@" sign in the posted string. But how? I've been searching for several hourse. And don't seem to run into any solution.

So I'll go to bed, and cross my fingers.

Thx in advance

Btw, this is what I'm trying:

I'm using a phonenumber or the email as login. Same field. If the user enters his phonenumber, I wanna make sure it works weather the user types:

0045xxxxxxxx 45xxxxxxxx

(0045) Danish area code.

  def phone(input)       unless input == ############## <------ unless what? Was thinking, unless @ in input.         value = input.to_s         lenStop = value.length         lenStart = value.length - 8         username = '45' + value[lenStart..lenStop]

        return username       else         return input       end   end

I figure code dosn't work if user puts spaces in his phonenumber. I guess that can be fixed with a gsub " ", "".. something like that.

2

David,

I believe that regular expressions is what you may be looking for..

s = "(0045) 444-5555"

=> "(0045) 444-5555"

codes = s.match /(\(\d+\))?\s*(\d{3})(\s*-\s*)?(\d{4})/

=> #<MatchData "(0045) 444-5555" 1:"(0045)" 2:"444" 3:"-" 4:"5555">

codes[0]

=> "(0045) 444-5555"

codes[1]

=> "(0045)"

codes[2]

=> "444"

codes[4]

=> "5555"

hth..

David Liwoch wrote:

3

Obviously not a genius with Ruby.

I simply want to check if the string from an form input is a phone number, or an email.

Read up on regular expressions

Fred

4

regular expressions on the menu today.

Cuz:

/(\(\d+\))?\s*(\d{3})(\s*-\s*)?(\d{4})/

Makes -200% sense to me currently

Thank you guys

5

the others are right to point you to regular expressions--definitely worth learning.

But to give you a fish, you can use String's method to check for an @ symbol.

  if my_string['@'] then     # my_string has an @ in it.   end

HTH,

-Roy

6

Hehe.. definetly a more simple way to do exactly that. Thank you

Guess Reg Exp can probably define a more accurate pattern for email validation.

Thx

7

Heh--there's actually a famous regexp (if you can imagine such a thing) that faithfully tracks the RFA spec for e-mail addresses. It's something like half a printed page long and would make a kick-ass tattoo.

I'm writing from the bus, else I'd google up a link to it.

But lots of much much simpler regexps will handle 99% of valid addresses. Those are easily googled up...

8

David -