Regular Expression for matching a phone number

Question

I need a regular expression to match phone numbers. I just want to know if the number is probably a phone number and it could be any phone format, US or international. So

Answer 1

The juqeury has a plugin for US phone validation. Check this link. You can also see the regular expression in the source code.

Answer 2

Well, you're pretty close. Try this:

^\+?[0-9\/.()-]{9,}$

Without the start and end anchors you allow partial matching, so it can match +123 from the string :-)+123.

If you want a minimum of 9 digits, rather than any characters (so ---.../// isn't valid), you can use:

^\+?[\/.()-]*([0-9][\/.()-]*){9,}$

or, using a lookahead - before matching the string for [0-9/.()-]* the regex engine is looking for (\D*\d){9}, which is a of 9 digits, each digit possibly preceded by other characters (which we will validate later).

^\+?(?=(\D*\d){9})[0-9\/.()-]*$

Answer 3

The reason why it matches alpha character is because of the period. You have to escape it. I don't know what editor you are using for this, this is what I'll use for VIM:

^+\?[()\-\.]\?\([0-9][\.()\-]\?\)\{3,\}$