I am trying to write a function that will pull valid phone numbers from a string that are valid somewhere on the planet. This is for a truly international site for an organization that has locations all over the globe and users in each location accessing it.
I mainly need this for a database migration. The previous sites that I am migrating from only used a simple text field with not instructions and no filtering. So this results in the phone fields being used in all sorts of creative ways.
What I am looking for it just to identify the first phone number in the string, then possibly remove any excessive characters before setting the result as user profile information.
you could use something like this:
$pattern = '/([\+_\-\(\)a-z ]+)/';
or
$pattern = '/([^0-9]+)/i';
$phone = preg_replace($pattern,'', $phone);
or, use a php filter like:
$phone = (int) filter_var($phone, FILTER_SANITIZE_NUMBER_INT);
although with the filter you would need to be careful if you were allowing the value to start with "0".
then, either way, check a range of lengths for allowed phone numbers ~6-12 or whatever your range covers.