Poor Data Entry of Phone Numbers

How many of you out there have phone number fields without any validation or formatting? I did. Today, I wrote a script to go through a database of contacts and "clean up" phone numbers and fax numbers. The script works as follows:

Run through a list of contacts
Remove all non-numeric elements from the #
If it starts with a 1, start the string from the 2nd character
Shorten the string to 10 characters
If there are not 10 character return an empty string
Otherwise, return the phone number without any punctuation
If the phone # is not the same as it was prior to being processed, show the difference on the screen for human analysis

Worked perfectly for this data set. For other datasets, one could parse out extensions and convert letters (for example 1-800-MATTRESS)

blog comments powered by Disqus

0 COMMENTS

Published February 17, 2004 by:

Ronnie

Ronnie Schwartz is the CTO and founder of RustyBrick, an agile web development firm that creates effective web applications and focuses on finding the right balance between time to production and software quality to get clients in front of their customers quickly and effectively. Ronnie brings over ten years of innovative design, programming and web management expertise to the table.

This article is under Web Programming

There are 0 comments for this post

Stay in touch with RustyBrick

Tel. 845-369-6869

Designing your dreams

Do you want more information on Web page design including; tips, usability or pricing? Please call contact us toll free at 877-GO-RUSTY or email us.