Replace non-numeric with empty string

Question

Quick add on requirement in our project. A field in our DB to hold a phone number is set to only allow 10 characters. So, if I get passed "(913)-444-5555" or anything else, is there a quick way to run a string through some kind of special replace function that I can pass it a set of characters to allow?

Regex?

Answer 1

Definitely regex:

string CleanPhone(string phone)
{
    Regex digitsOnly = new Regex(@"[^\d]");   
    return digitsOnly.Replace(phone, "");
}

or within a class to avoid re-creating the regex all the time:

private static Regex digitsOnly = new Regex(@"[^\d]");   

public static string CleanPhone(string phone)
{
    return digitsOnly.Replace(phone, "");
}

Depending on your real-world inputs, you may want some additional logic there to do things like strip out leading 1's (for long distance) or anything trailing an x or X (for extensions).

Answer 2

I'm sure there's a more efficient way to do it, but I would probably do this:

string getTenDigitNumber(string input)
{    
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    for(int i - 0; i < input.Length; i++)
    {
        int junk;
        if(int.TryParse(input[i], ref junk))
            sb.Append(input[i]);
    }
    return sb.ToString();
}

Answer 3

You can do it easily with regex:

string subject = "(913)-444-5555";
string result = Regex.Replace(subject, "[^0-9]", ""); // result = "9134445555"

Answer 4

Using the Regex methods in .NET you should be able to match any non-numeric digit using \D, like so:

phoneNumber  = Regex.Replace(phoneNumber, "\D", "");

Answer 5

try this

public static string cleanPhone(string inVal)
        {
            char[] newPhon = new char[inVal.Length];
            int i = 0;
            foreach (char c in inVal)
                if (c.CompareTo('0') > 0 && c.CompareTo('9') < 0)
                    newPhon[i++] = c;
            return newPhon.ToString();
        }