New to reg exp and preg_replace

[jennides]

Simple question...

I want to strip all non-numeric characters out of phone numbers entered in a form. The following is an example of what I'm doing now, but I know there must be a better way than this... I just can't seem to get my head wrapped around regular expressions.

Anyone got time to help me out?

$num = '1-234.567-7896';

$num = preg_replace("'-'", "", $num);
$num = preg_replace("'.'", "", $num);

echo $num;

Thx

JeNNiDeS

[NYSiRacer]

$phone_number = '[phone]';
list($area_code,$prefix,$number) = preg_split('/\D+/',$phone_number,-1,PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);

[jennides]

Thanks NYSiRacer!

It works great... it even accomplishes my next task of parsing out the area code, but there is one problem though. In scanning my db I noticed that a small percentage of my users entered "1-" at the beginning of the phone number. The way your code is set up now, if a user enters a phone number like 1-234-456-6789 $areacode will return 1.

Is there an easy work around?

The way I was doing it with my code in my initial post is like this:

$areacode = ($num[0] == '1') ? substr("$num", 1, 3) : substr("$num", 0, 3);

where $num is the phone number without any non-numerical characters.

I'm not sure how I can get around this with your code though.

[NYSiRacer]

Why don't you just provide 3 form fields? It's much easier this way...
Area Code: <input type="text" name="area_code" size="3" maxlength="3" /> Prefix: <input type="text" name="prefix" size="3" maxlength="3" /> Number: <input type="text" name="number" size="4" maxlength="4" />