Ultimate way to find phone numbers in PHP string with preg_replace

Question

working on a project right now where we have large amount of text strings that we must localize phone numbers and make them clickable for android phones.

The phone n

Answer 1

Perhaps something like this:

/(\+\d+)?\s*(\(\d+\))?([\s-]?\d+)+/

• (\+\d+)? = A "+" followed by one or more digits (optional)
• \s* = Any number of space characters (optional)
• (\(\d+\))? = A "(" followed by one or more digits followed by ")" (optional)
• ([\s-]?\d+)+ = One or more set of digits, optionally preceded by a space or dash

To be honest, though, I doubt that you'll find a one-expression-to-rule-them-all. Telephone numbers can be in so many different formats that it's probably impractical to match any possible format with no false positives or negatives.