Question

In C#.Net, here’s a simple example of how to format numbers into strings using custom format strings:
(example taken from: http://www.csharp-examples.net/string-format-int/)

String.Format("{0:+### ### ### ###}", 447900123456); // "[phone]"
String.Format("{0:##-####-####}", 8958712551);       // "89-5871-2551"

Is there a way to convert this formatted string back into a long/integer ? Is there someway to do this :

long PhoneNumber = Int32.Parse("89-5871-2551", "{0:##-####-####}");

I saw that DateTime has a method ParseExact which can do this work well. But I did not see any such thing for int/long/decimal/double.

Answer 1

Just Regex out all of the non-numeric characters, then parse that string.