Strip special characters and +1 from phone number

Question

I've been trying to validate phone numbers to the format 5555555555 . I've successfully been able to strip the phone number of all special characters, but if a phone number is entered with +15555555555, the number still contains '1' at the beginning of the number. Is there anyway to remove both the +1 and special characters?

My current regex is preg_replace('/^1|\\D/', "", +15555555555); .

Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

You don't need a regular expression for this.

str_replace('+1', '', $string)

will do it. However to explain why your regex currently fails, your string doesn't start with 1 , it starts with +1 so ^1 is not a match.

Demo of current usage: https://regex101.com/r/kwwp1r/1/

Demo of a possible regex solution: https://regex101.com/r/kwwp1r/2/

^\+1

Answer 2

Just replace the +1 from it

$phone_num = "+15555555555";

$phone_num = preg_replace('/\+1/','',$phone_num);

echo $phone_num;

or you could use str_replace('+1','',$phone_num), either or. I always use preg_replace out of habit.