Question

Ok so i have a variable $phone which contains the string [phone] and I have this code

 if($phone != ''){ $phone = "<span id='telephone'>{$phone}</span>";}
return $phone;

This works fine but now the client wants to have a some padding in between the area code and the next three numbers. So i need the code to be like this

<span id='telephone'><span class='spacer'>(407)</span>888-9999</span>";

Answer 1

Given no one else mentioned this, I would strip out all non-numeric characters from the number. Once done you can use a regex to easily get the numbers, this way any format is valid and pretty much no matter what the user enters you can format it how you want it:

$phone = preg_replace("~[^0-9]~", "", $phone);
preg_match('~([0-9]{3})([0-9]{3})([0-9]{4})~', $phone, $matches);

if (!empty($matches)) {
    $display = "<span id='telephone'><span class='spacer'>(" . 
                $matches[1] . ")</span>" . $matches[2] . "-" . $matches[3] . "</span>";
}else {
    $display = "An invalid phone number was entered.";
}

Should do it not matter how the phone number is entered as long as there are 10 digits.

UPDATE

You could also use the preg_replace technique with substr and forego the need for preg_match. This would actually be my preferred solution.

$phone = preg_replace("~[^0-9]~", "", $phone);

if (strlen($phone) == 10) {
    $display = "<span id='telephone'><span class='spacer'>(" . 
                substr($phone,0,3) . ")</span>" . substr($phone,2,3) . "-" . substr($phone,5,4) . "</span>";
}else {
    $display = "An invalid phone number was entered.";
}