Question

The code below gives me this mysterious error, and i cannot fathom it. I am new to regular expressions and so am consequently stumped. The regular expression should be validating any international phone number.

Any help would be much appreciated.

function validate_phone($phone) {     $phoneregexp ='^(\+[1-9][0-9]*(\([0-9]*\)|-[0-9]*-))?[0]?[1-9][0-9\- ]*$';      $phonevalid = 0;      if (ereg($phoneregexp, $phone))     {         $phonevalid = 1;     }else{         $phonevalid = 0;     } } 

Answer 1

If this is PHP, then the regex must be enclosed in quotes. Furthermore, what’s preg? Did you mean preg_match?

Another thing. PHP knows boolean values. The canonical solution would rather look like this:

return preg_match($regex, $phone) !== 0; 

EDIT: Or, using ereg:

return ereg($regex, $phone) !== FALSE; 

(Here, the explicit test against FALSE isn’t strictly necessary but since ereg returns a number upon success I feel safer coercing the value into a bool).