Phone¶ ↑

Parsing, validating and creating phone numbers

Install¶ ↑

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

Updates in v 1.0¶ ↑

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

Phoner::Phone

Initializing¶ ↑

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

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

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

Parsing¶ ↑

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'

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

Phoner::Phone.parse '451-588'

Automatic country and area code detection¶ ↑

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¶ ↑

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

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

TODO¶ ↑

Parse testing for different countries.

Currently tested on:

AF: Afghanistan
AL: Albania
AR: Argentina
AT: Austria
AU: Australia
BA: Bosnia and Herzegovina
BD: Bangladesh
BE: Belgium
BG: Bulgaria
BO: Bolivia
BR: Brazil
BT: Bhutan
BY: Belarus
BZ: Belize
CA: Canada
CR: Costa Rica
CY: Cyprus
CZ: Czech Republic
DE: Germany
DK: Denmark
DZ: Algeria
EC: Ecuador
EE: Estonia
EG: Egypt
ET: Ethiopia
FI: Finland
FR: France
GB: United Kingdom
GE: Georgia
GH: Ghana

[GR} Greece

GU: Guam
GT: Guatemala
GY: Guyana
HR: Croatia
HU: Hungary
IL: Israel
IN: India
IR: Iran
KE: Kenya
LK: Sri Lanka
NG: Nigeria
NL: Netherlands
NO: Norway
NP: Nepal
PH: Philippines
PK: Pakistan
QA: Qatar
RS: Serbia
SA: Saudi Arabia
SE: Sweden
SI: Slovenia
SV: El Salvador
TO: Tonga
UA: Ukraine
US: United States
ZA: South Africa
ZW: Zimbabwe

How you can contribute¶ ↑

More testing is needed to add support for missing countries, and improve support for tested countries. In many cases only minimal testing is done on area codes, local number formats and number length where more exact matching is possible.

The best places to start is to read through the country tests and data/phone_countries.rb

Contributors¶ ↑

Tomislav Carr, Don Morrison, Michael Squires, Todd Eichel (Fooala, Inc.), chipiga, Etienne Samson, Luke Randall, Wesley Moxam

housekeeper/phone