Formatting Phone Numbers in PHP

Question

I am working on an SMS app and need to be able to convert the sender\'s phone number from +11234567890 to 123-456-7890 so it can be compared to re

Answer 1

Phone numbers are hard. For a more robust, international solution, I would recommend this well-maintained PHP port of Google's libphonenumber library.

Using it like this,

use libphonenumber\NumberParseException;
use libphonenumber\PhoneNumber;
use libphonenumber\PhoneNumberFormat;
use libphonenumber\PhoneNumberUtil;

$phoneUtil = PhoneNumberUtil::getInstance();

$numberString = "+12123456789";

try {
    $numberPrototype = $phoneUtil->parse($numberString, "US");

    echo "Input: " .          $numberString . "\n";
    echo "isValid: " .       ($phoneUtil->isValidNumber($numberPrototype) ? "true" : "false") . "\n";
    echo "E164: " .           $phoneUtil->format($numberPrototype, PhoneNumberFormat::E164) . "\n";
    echo "National: " .       $phoneUtil->format($numberPrototype, PhoneNumberFormat::NATIONAL) . "\n";
    echo "International: " .  $phoneUtil->format($numberPrototype, PhoneNumberFormat::INTERNATIONAL) . "\n";
} catch (NumberParseException $e) {
    // handle any errors
}

you will get the following output:

Input: +12123456789
isValid: true
E164: +12123456789
National: (212) 345-6789
International: +1 212-345-6789

I'd recommend using the E164 format for duplicate checks. You could also check whether the number is a actually mobile number or not (using PhoneNumberUtil::getNumberType()), or whether it's even a US number (using PhoneNumberUtil::getRegionCodeForNumber()).

As a bonus, the library can handle pretty much any input. If you, for instance, choose to run 1-800-JETBLUE through the code above, you will get

Input: 1-800-JETBLUE
isValid: true
E164: +18005382583
National: (800) 538-2583
International: +1 800-538-2583

Neato.

It works just as nicely for countries other than the US. Just use another ISO country code in the parse() argument.