Put the dash back into the phone numbers

[Anon]

Hello,
I am trying to put the dash back in phone numbers that are displayed from the MySql datatdase. They are stored like this. 5551234 I would like to display them as 555-12354. Sounds simple enough but I am a newbie and can not understand the php manual. This is what I tried:

$HomePhone = number_format($HomePhone, 2,'','-');

The result was this: 5-551-234.00

Can somebody please help me?

[Anon]

fdsfds

[mithril]

You're actually dealing with strings here, not numbers. Thus:

$HomePhone = substr($HomePhone, 0, 3) . "-" . substr($HomePhone, 3, strlen($HomePhone));

should do the trick for you. HTH.

-geoff

[Anon]

Well, Yu thanks for the fdsfds it was a lot of help. But I will use this longer solution that I found in the forum:

             $Phoneh ="$HomePhone";  
                      $Phoneh1 = substr("$Phoneh", 0, 3); 
                      $Phoneh2 = substr("$Phoneh", 3); 
                      $Phoneh = $Phoneh1."-".$Phoneh2; 

Unless somebody has a more simple answer.

[Anon]

Thank you Geoff, That is better than the one I found.

[Anon]

$cep = '01010000';//no matter how long it is.
$cepini = substr ("$cep", 0, 3);
$cepend = substr ("$cep", strlen($cep)-1);
echo"$cepini - $cepend";
// good luck

[Anon]

sorry was no need to add "-1" at the end.

Hakan OZCAN wrote:

$cep = '01010000';//no matter how long it is.
$cepini = substr ("$cep", 0, 3);
$cepend = substr ("$cep", strlen($cep)-1);
echo"$cepini - $cepend";
// good luck

[[deleted]]

exotic but to cute to ignore:

$sNum = "1234567890";
$sNum = preg_replace("/([0-9]{3})(.*)/", "\1-\2", $sNum);
echo $sNum;

[mithril]

Vincent's solutions is actually more elegnt, though it may not appear easier🙂

One quick note about the way you've re-written my suggestion..... there's no need to create the $Phoneh1 and $Phoneh2 temp. variables. Just concatenate the substr() calls into the final formatted number creatation. Creating the temp. vars just requires a bit of additional and unnecessary memeory allocation.

-geoff

[[deleted]]

"Vincent's solutions is actually more elegnt, though it may not appear easier🙂"

:-)

let me explain for those who do not understand:

$sNum = preg_replace("/([0-9]{3})(.*)/", "\1-\2", $sNum);

The first parameter defines a 'pattern' which describes what I am looking for.
The second parameter defines what I want to replace every occurence of the pattern with.
The third parameter defined the string in which I want to replace.

The pattern consists of two slashes which define the beginning and the end of the pattern. Inside the slashes I have two sets of parentheses. These define blocks that I can refer to later.
The first block is for the first three digits. [0-9]{3} the [0-9] means 'any number between 0 and 9 and the {3} means 'must appear three times in a row; so it will match a sequence of three numbers (000 through 999)
The second block is simple: (.*) the dot means means 'any character' and the star means 'zero or more times' so this matches anything, or 'whatever is left'

So the pattern will match on a sequence of three numbers, followed by anything (even nothing).

The second parameter contains 'backreferences'.
"\1-\2" the \1 and \2 refer to the blocks from the first pattern. \1 will contain the string that matched on the first block of the pattern, the three-number sequence. \2 will contain the match of (.*)
so "\1\2" would give the original string back.
But I want a dash between the first three numbers and the rest, so I put a dash between the \1 and the \2.

that's all folks.

[mithril]

My my... Vincent, such an uncharacteristically long response🙂 Surprised you didn't put in a manual reference to preg_match(). For those who want more information on what Vincent mentioned in his post, take a gander at Perl-Compatible and POSIX-Extended Regular Expression Functions in the manual:

http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.pcre.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.regex.php
http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.preg-match.php

-geoff