Question

I have a variable which has to allow only numbers , dashes and parenthesis, there is no particular length for phone number , And the validation must be done in php , no javascript allowed,

EDIT
Just wanted to allow spaces too to the regular expressions….

Thanks

Answer 1

So, I am a bit confused about the question here, but I’ll give it a shot and hopefully it gets you to where you need to be.

This will allow anything containing the specified characters. [phone] will be allowed. As will 32084248())(21324234--234242-23- (clearly not a phone number)

if( preg_match("/^[0-9() -]+$/", $number) {
    // Only numbers, parens and hypens allowed
}

If you want to make the regex a bit more strict, we can limit to US-style numbers:

if( preg_match("/^\d{0,3}-?(?:\(\d{3}\)|\d{3})-?\d{3}-?\d{4}$/", $number) {
    // US Phone number
}

This will only allow US style numbers with an optional country code.