Telephone Number Format for integrated recognition

[Dick Montage]

I'm sanitising a database, and part of that is the issue that all our phone numbers are stored in a few different formats.  Some of these formats work well for phone number recognition (when the OS recognises that it's a phone number and converts it to a link) and others less so.

 

The TAPI spec (which isn't 100% relevant but is a far starting point) suggests +(COUNTRY)_(AREA)_SUBSCRIBER but I have found that omitting the first brackets actually works better.

 

Does anyone have any experience here at all?

 

Thanks

[Dick Montage]

My findings so far show that the best format (for a fictional UK telephone number) to be written in an international format is +44 (0) 121 555 4444   This conforms to the e.164 spec as well as Google's suggested best practices.

[goretsky Supervisor]

Hello,

 

Please do ensure all phone numbers entered into the database begin with a plus-sign and the country code, even if they are local numbers.  Because, at some point, there may be some breakage.  I had an employer that did not enter the country code into phone numbers for their employees, and during one of the smartphone migrations, ended up with a corporate address book pushed out that caused all employees in San Diego (+1 for the U.S, 619 for San Diego area code) having all their direct inbound dial lines try to call Australia (+61 for Australia).

 

Also, don't make any assumptions about the arbitrary length of the phone numbers.  Otherwise, you may one day end up needing to enter a phone number with more digits than your system allows for.

 

Regards,

 

Aryeh Goretsky

 

[Slugsie]

On 12/21/2018 at 9:49 AM, Human.Online said:

My findings so far show that the best format (for a fictional UK telephone number) to be written in an international format is +44 (0) 121 555 4444   This conforms to the e.164 spec as well as Google's suggested best practices.

I can't help you much with a standard format, but I would point out that a significant number of UK land lines (and all mobiles) are in the format +44 (0) 1234 567890.

[Dick Montage]

2 hours ago, Slugsie said:

I can't help you much with a standard format, but I would point out that a significant number of UK land lines (and all mobiles) are in the format +44 (0) 1234 567890.

Yeah I'm in the UK, so get that, and yes, I'm not arbitrarily setting a max length.

 

As it stands, I have tidied all down to:

 

+{COUNTRY} ({INTERNAL}) {REGION} {SUBSCRIBER WITH SPACING AS RELEVANT}

 

This seems to hold valid for UK mobile, UK landline, UK non geographical, UK specialist, Foreign landline, Foreign mobile.  That represents within itself 99.4% of the database, and the other 0.6% contains a lot of dross and poor data that hasn't been valid in years.

 

Thanks