Question

as per the specification
phone number should be

Alhpa-Numeric,
Space allowed,
hypen allowed,
bracket allowed,
max length = 45
can be null as well.

below is what i made using my limited knowledge and examples but its giving

error : Compilation failed: nothing to repeat at offset 29

My PHONE regex =

define('PHONE','#([a-zA-Z0-9][\s\(\)\-])*{0,45}#i');

please guide what should i do to have all the above specification matched using regex.
thanks

Answer 1

The regex won’t match what you want, with ([a-zA-Z0-9][\s\(\)\-]) each number must be followed by a space, parentheses or hyphen. to fix that make [\s\(\)\-] optional:

([a-zA-Z0-9][\s\(\)\-]?)

and use preg_match.