Question

I was browsing through the internet to find a proper javascript regular expression for phone numbers but the ones I find are not the ones I need.

The acceptable phone number type for my case would have to match the following rules:

• May start with + or 0-9
• all rest string is allowed to have only 0-9, - and space (preferably only 1 space between numbers)

I tried so far this: /^\+[\-\d\s]/ but I am not getting the proper result. I’ve tried to read some tutorials but I am very new to this and it seems I am missing something.

An acceptable phone number for example would be: [phone] (spaces allowed) or 0030 6995 4488551 etc.

Any help would be much appreciated! 🙂

Answer 1

Your regex matches anything that starts with a + followed by a single -, digit or whitespace character. So you will match for example:

• +4qwertzuiopasdfghjkl
• +-asdfasdfasdfasdf

I suggest you to look at the examples and tutorials on http://www.regular-expressions.info/. As for your telephone numbers a better regex would be:

/^\+?[\d -]+$/

This would match all valid numbers but also invalid constructions like +--------- or simply + with a trailing space. If you want to be really close to denying a lot of invalid combinations I would suggest you read this, but as you can see the regexes get messy.