Question

I have a huge text file that is a copy and paste job from a PDF phone bill. I need to extract each phone number and put it in an array so that I can insert the numbers into a DB table and run some queries on it.

I am using preg_match_all to try and match all of the numbers and failing miserably. Here is the code I have:

$phone_list = "13:26 [phone] 13:49 [phone] 13:56 [phone] 14:17 [phone] 14:23 [phone] 14:28 [phone] 14:34";
preg_match_all('/^\(?(\d{3})\)?[- ]?(\d{3})[- ]?(\d{4})$/',$phone_list,$matches);

…Which returns nothing. If I shorten the $phone_list to:

$phone_list = "[phone]";

…I get a result. What am I missing?

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

Remove the anchors ^ and $ – they force the regex to match the entire string.

^ means “Assert that the match starts at the start of the string”.

$ means “Assert that the match ends at the end of the string”.