phone

Parsing, validating and creating phone numbers

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• [Email](mailto:don at elskwid.net)

Version

This documentation is for the unreleased development branch.

• Current release: 1.3.0.beta1
• Current stable: 1.2.3

Description

Ruby library for phone number parsing, validation, and formatting.

Features

Automatic country and area code detection

Phone does its best to automatically detect the country and area code while parsing. To do this, phone uses data stored in data/phone/countries.yml.

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

If an area_code regular expression isn't specified, a default value which is considered correct for the US will be used.

If your country has phone numbers longer that 8 digits - exluding country and area code - you can specify that within the country's configuration in data/phone/countries.yml

Validating

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

Phoner::Phone.valid? 'blabla 091/555-4488 blabla'

Formatting

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 (5554488)
• %f - first @@n1_length characters of number (configured through Phoner::Phone.n1_length), default is 3 (555)
• %l - last characters of number (4488)
• %x - the extension number

pn = Phoner::Phone.parse('+385915554488')
pn.to_s # => "+385915554488"
pn.format("%A/%f-%l") # => "091/555-4488"
pn.format("+ %c (%a) %n") # => "+ 385 (91) 5554488"

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) 91 555 4488"
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) # => 091/555-4488

Finding countries by their isocode

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', ...). Remember to call Phoner::Country.load before using this lookup.

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

Examples

require 'phone'

Initializing

Initialize a new phone object with the number, area code, country code and extension number:

Phoner::Phone.new('5554488', '91', '385')

Phoner::Phone.new(:number => '5554488', :area_code => '91', :country_code => '385', :extension => '143')

Parsing

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 '+385915554488'
Phoner::Phone.parse '00385915554488'

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

Phoner::Phone.parse '091/555-4488', :country_code => '385'
Phoner::Phone.parse '(091) 555 4488', :country_code => '385'

If you feel that it's tedious, set the default country code once:

Phoner::Phone.default_country_code = '385'
Phoner::Phone.parse '091/555-4488'
Phoner::Phone.parse '(091) 555 4488'

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'

Adding and maintaining countries

From time to time, the specifics about your countries information may change. You can add or update your countries configuration by editing data/phone/countries.yml

The following are the available attributes for configuration:

• country_code: Required. A string representing your country's international dialling code. e.g. "123"
• national_dialing_prefix: Required. A string representing your default dialling prefix for national calls. e.g. "0"
• char_3_code: Required. A string representing a country's ISO code. e.g. "US"
• name: Required. The name of the country. e.g. "Denmark"
• international_dialing_prefix: Required. The dialling prefix a country typically uses when making international calls. e.g. "0"
• area_code: Optional. A regular expression detailing valid area codes. Default: "\d{3}" i.e. any 3 digits.
• max_num_length: Optional. The maximum length of a phone number after country and area codes have been removed. Default: 8

Test Countries

• [AU] Australia
• [BA] Bosnia and Herzegovina
• [BE] Belgium
• [DE] Germany
• [ES] Spain
• [FR] France
• [GB] United Kingdom
• [HR] Croatia
• [HU] Hungary
• [IE] Ireland
• [ME] Montenegro
• [NL] Netherlands
• [NZ] New Zealand
• [PT] Portugal
• [RS] Serbia
• [SE] Sweden
• [SI] Slovenia
• [UA] Ukraine
• [US] United States
• [UY] Uruguay
• [ZA] South Africa

Known issues

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

Requirements

Install

$ gem install phone

Or as a Rails plugin, in your Gemfile

gem 'phone'

And then bundle install from your command line.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2010-2013 Tomislav Car, Infinum Copyright (c) 2013 Don Morrison

See LICENSE.txt for details.

Contributors

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