match phone numbers from text

Question

I have regex in php that matches pretty good phone numbers from some text.

([\+|0](?:[0-9/\-\(\) ] ?){7,25}[0-9])    

good matches: 041 797 - 991 or +386 2 80 55 291 or +386 (0)41 718 827

bad match: 000/000/13 (if it has three zeros in front doesn`t match, maybe?)

How could i remove this bad match?

Answer 1

You can use a negative assertion (?!...) for that.

A similar example was also somewhere in the numberous existing questions on php regex match phone number , just browse around.

Or you could just loop over the match results and filter them by your new criteria.

Answer 2

Why not simply loop through for all of the numbers and then validate that (remove all extraneous characters):

preg_match_all("/\d/",$phone_number,$array);
// $array[0] will be an array of each digit

Then you can validate based on the length (eg decide if it has a country code or not and check it against a stored array or table).

Answer 3

This fixes your regex:

(?!(?:0[ /-]*){2,})([\+|0](?:[0-9/\-\(\) ] ?){7,25}[0-9])

Since you have already worked on your expression to allow certain characters that you see in your dataset, instead of writing a new one from scratch, I worked with yours.

The added phrase at the beginning is a negative lookahead.

(?!(?:0[ /-]*){2,})

Translation: Looking ahead at the beginning of the match, we don't want to see a { zero (optionally followed by characters such as a space, slash or hyphen)} two or more times.

If two zeros are actually okay, change the 2 to a three. Also tweak the characters inside [ /-] depending on what your data looks like.

I checked the regex against your sample data. It works.