[SOLVED] ereg() help

[Dragen]

Hi, I'm trying to use ereg() to check if an input from a form contains certain characters. It's an english phone number so I want to check that it only contains numbers (0-9) and it may then have a space followed by more numbers..

I'm not quite sure how to work this as I don't understand the expressions very well.. What I've got at the moment is:

if(ereg('[^0-9]', $value)){

do this code etc, but i need to check for the space, then more numbers that may or may not be there.

I've tried various things like:

if(ereg('^[0-9].[0-9]', $value)){

 

can't get it to work...

thanks

[Dragen]

okay I've pretty much figured it out now..

I'm currently using this code:

if(!ereg('^[0-9]+.[0-9]+$', $value)){

 

But as I'm using the '.' it means that any single letter or number can be inserted here.. I want to make it so it can only be a single empty space.

[effigy]

Do you have any specific formats in mind? Below is some code I posted a while back:

 

<pre>
<?php
$phones = array(
	'(123) 456-7890',
	'456-7890',
	'(123) 456-7890 x1234',
	'456-7890 x1234'
);

foreach($phones as $num) {
	preg_match('/^(?:\(([0-9]{3})\)\s+)?([0-9]{3})-([0-9]{4})(?:\s+x([0-9]{4}))?$/', $num, $matches);
	echo "matches on: $num";
	print_r($matches);
}
?>
</pre>

[Dragen]

Thanks for the reply. Basically I want it to be able to accept an input which is all numbers, and also an input which is all numbers, but has a single blank space somewhere in it.. for example:

01769 569251
01769569251

should both be acceptable

..but:

01769a569251
01769  569251 //more than one space
01769abcd569251

should not be acceptable

[effigy]

That could be a little tricky. Is the whitespace even important? It might be better to strip all of the whitespace and see how many numbers you have left.

[Dragen]

hmm.. I guess not. It's more for the display of it, but I guess I could add in the space after so many characters when I display the code, and force the phone numbers to be entered as one strip of continuous numbers.

so I guess this would force it to be just numbers:

if(ereg('[^0-9+]', $value)){

If I want it to be only a certain amount of numbers would it be something like this:

if(ereg('[^0-9{10}]', $value)){

where 10 is the amount of numbers?

[effigy]

Almost. The quantifiers go behind the brackets: [...]+ or [...]{#}; and don't use ^ inside the brackets unless you want negation. You'll also want ^ and $ around your pattern to anchor it to the entire string.

[Dragen]

okay so would this work?

if(ereg('^[0-9]{10}$', $value)){

[effigy]

Yes; that looks for exactly 10 numbers.

[Dragen]

Thanks.. I've spiced it up a bit so it's now:

if(!ereg('^([0-9]{11}|[0-9]{5}[[:space:]][0-9]{6})$', $value))

 

which works great! I found out that [[:space:]] is used for white space.