Using a single input for phone / email in a contact form

Question

I'm thinking about using a contact form with a user input for phone or email (by single input).

I would like to know if it's possible to use HTML number / email input for this somehow? and, should I do this type of validation on the server-side?

The HTML form:

<form name="contact" target="contact.php" method="post"> 
      <input name="fullname" placeholder="Name" type="text" value="" minlength="2" required="">
      <input name="emailPhone" placeholder="email / phone" type="email" value="" required="">
      <input value="send" type="submit">
</form>

The code from contact.php :

   $name = trim(stripslashes($_POST['fullname']));
   $ep_input = trim(stripslashes($_POST['emailPhone']));

   // Name validation
    if (strlen($name) < 2) {
        $error['name'] = "Invalid name";
    }

    // Email and phone number validation. first, the email...
    if (!preg_match('/^[a-z0-9&\'\.\-_\+]+@[a-z0-9\-]+\.([a-z0-9\-]+\.)*+[a-z]{2}/is', $ep_input)) {
        $error['email'] = "invalid email address.";
    }
    // Now the phone (should be more accurate but we keep it simple for now...)  
    else if (!preg_match('/^[0-9]*$/', $ep_input) {
        $error['phone'] = "invalid phone number.";
    }

I would like to know if it's possible to use HTML5 validation somehow for both. if not, it will be nice if anyone can share a better way to achieve this result with some JS/Jquery/AJAX code before sending the form data to the PHP file...

Answer 1

1. Change the input type to text.
2. Check if a field input contains only digits, then validate a phone number of 10 digits
3. If it contains alphanumeric, then validates whether the value is a valid e-mail address or not using FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL.

---

<?php
$ep=trim(stripslashes($_POST['emailPhone']));
if(is_numeric($ep))
{
    if(!preg_match('/^\d{10}$/',$ep))
    {
        echo "invalid phone";
    }
}
else 
{
    if (!filter_var($ep, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
        echo "Invalid email format"; 
    }
}
?>

Answer 2

Here is the temporary solution using only html & php to get phone number or email with a single HTML form input:

html (with a textual type):

<input name="emailPhone" placeholder="email / phone" type="text" value="" required="">

php :

 <?php
$name = trim(stripslashes($_POST['fullname']));
$ep = trim(stripslashes($_POST['emailPhone'])); 

// Check phone number for 10 digits
if(is_numeric($ep))
{
  if(!preg_match('/^\d{10}$/',$ep)) {
      $error = "invalid phone number.";
  }
  $eptype = "phone";
  }

// Check valid email format
else 
{  
  if (!filter_var($ep, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
    $error = "invalid email address.";
  }
  $eptype = "email";
}

// Send the information via email with php or show the error
  $mailto = "email@example.com";
  $massage = "Please contact". $name ."via ". $eptype .": ". $ep;

if (!$error) {
  $sendmail = mail($mailto, "Subject", $massage);
  } 

else {
  echo $error;
  }
?>

I guess there is a better way to achieve this goal with JS but since there was no answer I hope this code can be useful too.