Why doesn't a phone number datatype/library exist

Question

Just wondering if anyone is aware of any low level phone number storage constructs for C#. I have been surprised to find that all of my searches have proved fruitless for such a library.

Essentially I am hoping for something that can take a string phone number input (in all its varied goodness) and both validate and segment the given string into its various sections (IE: country code, area code, number) along with providing a common format to store this data.

Does any such library exist? If not, any idea why something like this hasn't been attempted? (Is it really that hard a problem?)

Answer 1

I think that the main reason is that between people themselves there seems to be no real standard way of writing the phone number. For instance, people living on small islands tend to not have regional codes and there is no need for the country code when calling residents of the same island.

This changes when you move to larger places. Also, I have seen certain numbers written as (XXXX)XXXXX or XXXXX-XXXXX or XXXXXXXXXX .

The standard way of dealing with this seems to be with regular expressions. The developer usually takes a few possible input formats and uses regular expressions to validate and transform the format of the number.

Answer 2

So it turns out there is actually a pretty awesome library available after all.

Original Java version: http://code.google.com/p/libphonenumber/

C# version: https://bitbucket.org/pmezard/libphonenumber-csharp/wiki/Home

Me discussing the library on my blog .