Regular Expression for finding phone numbers
Possible Duplicates:
A comprehensive regex for phone number validation
grep with regex for phone number
Hello Everyone,
I am new to Stackoverflow and I have a quick question. Let's assume we are given a large number of HTML files (large as in theoretically infinite). How can I use Regular Expressions to extract the list of Phone Numbers from all those files?
Explanation/expression will be really appreciated. The Phone numbers can be any of the following formats:
- (123) 456 7899
- (123).456.7899
- (123)-456-7899
- 123-456-7899
- 123 456 7899
- 1234567899
Thanks a lot for all your help and have a good one!
Answer
/^[\.-)( ]*([0-9]{3})[\.-)( ]*([0-9]{3})[\.-)( ]*([0-9]{4})$/
Should accomplish what you are trying to do.
The first part ^ means the "start of the line" which will force it to account for the whole string.
The [\.-)( ]* that I have in there mean "any period, hyphen, parenthesis, or space appearing 0 or more times".
The ([0-9]{3}) clusters match a group of 3 numbers (the last one is set to match 4)
Hope that helps!