Question

I am specifically targeting numerical only, So if I am using a phone mask using javascript on front end that filters user input to [phone], basically [2-9] and [0-9] as mask (jquery.maskedinput-1.3.js) and mobile filter…

jQuery(function ($e) {
var isMobile = navigator.userAgent.match(/(iPhone|iPod|iPad|Android|BlackBerry)/);
$e('#refer').val(window.location.href);

if (!(isMobile)) {      
    $e('#phone').mask('[phone]');
    $e('#field_phone_number').mask('299-299-9999');
}
}); 

For server side I have a regular expression in PHP as (nothing special yet)

function phonenumber($value)
{
    return preg_match("/\(?\b[(. ]?[0-9]{3}\)?[). ]?[0-9]{3}[-. ]?[0-9]{4}\b/i", $value);
} 

How can a create a regex or php script that targets all numerical values without creating a very long regex for each character? I just want to know if someone types in [phone], they get a false on the return.

Answer 1

function phonenumber($value)
{
    $prefix = '\d{3}'; // You might want to specify '2\d\d' (200 to 299)
    $regex = '#^(\('.$prefix.'\)|'.$prefix.')[\s\.-]?\d{3}[\.-]?\d{4}$#';
    if (preg_match($regex, $value))
    {
        // Number is in a suitable format

        // Now extract digits -- remove this section to not test repeated pattern
        $digits = preg_replace('#[^\d]+#', '', $value);

        // All numbers equal are rejected
        if (preg_match('#^(\d)\1{9}$#', $digits))
            return false;
        // end of pattern check

        // Otherwise it is accepted
        return true;
    }
    return false; // Not in a recognized format
}

This will accept [phone] and 277-111-2222, and also (400)1234567 or 4001234567. It will reject (400-1234567 and 400-12-34-56-7. It will also reject [phone] because of the repeated 2’s.