Question

I am a php novice and know there is a simple solution, however I can’t seem to find it. I am looking to perge the field of user entered symbols on return and apply formatting.

static function getFormatedNum($num){
    if(empty($num)){}else{
    $first=  "(".substr($num, 0, 3).")";
    $second= substr($num,3,3)."-";
    $third=substr($num,6,4);
    $num=$first.$second.$third;}
    return $num;

Answer 1

Update: doing all the work in the same function

function getFormatedNum($num){
    //first strip all the non-digit characters from the input
    $num = preg_replace("/[^0-9]+/", "", $num);
    //and only then re-format the phone-number   
    if(!empty($num)){
      $first=  "(".substr($num, 0, 3).")";
      $second= substr($num,3,3)."-";
      $third=substr($num,6,4);
      $num=$first.$second.$third;
    }
    return $num;
}
//test
echo getFormatedNum("408.807.9565");

Output:

[phone]