Phone Number Validator/Filter using jQuery or Zend Form?

Question

I'm thinking about adding some validation/filtering to the phone number field of my Zend Framework application. Not sure if this is something I should do or not.

I thought it might be helpful for users to have such a feature so I could enforce a particular display format. I'm not sure if the formatting of the phone number should be stored in the database, or when it is retrieved from the database. I don't want to be too strict about this because it's not really that important. I just wanted to prevent half the people from entering 123.456.7890 as their phone number format and the other half entering (123) 456-7890 as the other format. I want the listing of phone numbers to look consistent. So maybe I should use some javascript to help the user enter their number? Maybe there is a jQuery plugin that already does that and I can integrate it with my Zend Form?

What do you think?

Answer 1

One of my favorite recommendations:

JQuery Masked Input Plug-in

Answer 2

You will still want to enforce validation on the back end as javascript validation can be bypassed easily. This is my validation plugin which forces +1.1234567890:

class App_Validate_Phone extends Zend_Validate_Abstract
{
    const NOT_VALID = 'phoneInvalid';

    protected $_messageTemplates = array(
        self::NOT_VALID => "Phone number '%value%' must be in the format +COUNTRYCODE.PHONENUMBER. Example: +1.4071234567"
    );

    public function isValid($value)
    {
        $this->_setValue($value);

        if (!preg_match('/^\+([0-9]+)\.([0-9]+)$/',$value)) {
            $this->_error(self::NOT_VALID);
            return false;
        }

        return true;
    }
}

If you google phone validation regex you can find any number of validation regular expressions which you can substitute in *preg_match()* for your particular needs.

Answer 3

U dont need to create a custom validator to phones... Zend has a proposal to phone validator using localization... while not ready u can use Regex validator...

//Add element for phoneNumber1
$this->addElement('text', 'phoneNumber1', array(
    'label'     =>  'Primary Phone Number',
    'required'  =>  false,
));
$phone1 = $this->getElement('phoneNumber1');
$phone1->addValidator('regex', false, array('pattern' => '^[2-9][0-9]{2}-[0-9]{3}-[0-9{4}$', 'messages' => 'Enter a valid Phone Number'));