Use Regex to find a phone number on a page not in an anchor

Question

I have this regex expression that searches for a phone number pattern:

[(]?\\d{3}[)]?[(\\s)?.-]\\d{3}[\\s.-]\\d{4}

This matches phone numbe

Answer 1

Don't use regular expressions to parse HTML. Use HTML/DOM parsers to get the text nodes (the browser can filter it down for you, to remove anchor tags and all text too short to contain a phone number for instance) and you can check the text directly.

For example, with XPath (which is a bit ugly, but has support for dealing with text nodes directly in a way most other DOM methods do not):

// This query finds all text nodes with at least 12 non-whitespace characters
// who are not direct children of an anchor tag
// Letting XPath apply basic filters dramatically reduces the number of elements
// you need to process (there are tons of short and/or pure whitespace text nodes
// in most DOMs)
var xpr = document.evaluate('descendant-or-self::text()[not(parent::A) and string-length(normalize-space(self::text())) >= 12]',
                            document.body, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);
for (var i=0, len=xpr.snapshotLength; i < len; ++i) {
    var txt = xpr.snapshotItem(i);
    // Splits with grouping to preserve the text split on
    var numbers = txt.data.split(/([(]?\d{3}[)]?[(\s)?.-]\d{3}[\s.-]\d{4})/);
    // split will return at least three items on a hit, prefix, split match, and suffix
    if (numbers.length >= 3) {
        var parent = txt.parentNode; // Save parent before replacing child
        // Insert new elements before existing element; first element is just
        // text before first phone number
        parent.insertBefore(document.createTextNode(numbers[0]), txt);

        // Now explicitly create pairs of anchors and following text nodes
        for (var j = 1; j < numbers.length; j += 2) {
            // Operate in pairs; odd index is phone number, even is
            // text following that phone number
            var anc = document.createElement('a');
            anc.href = 'tel:' + numbers[j].replace(/\D+/g, '');
            anc.textContent = numbers[j];
            parent.insertBefore(anc, txt);
            parent.insertBefore(document.createTextNode(numbers[j+1]), txt);
        }
        // Remove original text node now that we've inserted all the
        // replacement elements and don't need it for positioning anymore
        parent.removeChild(txt);

        parent.normalize(); // Normalize whitespace after rebuilding
    }
}

For the record, the basic filters help a lot on most pages. For example, on this page, right now, as I see it (will vary by user, browser, browser extensions and scripts, etc.) without the filters, the snapshot for the query 'descendant-or-self::text()' would have 1794 items. Omitting text parented by anchor tags, 'descendant-or-self::text()[not(parent::A)]' gets it down to 1538, and the full query, verifying that the non-whitespace content is at least twelve characters long gets it down to 87 items. Applying the regex to 87 items is chump change, performance-wise, and you've removed the need to parse HTML with an unsuitable tool.