Objective-c regex to check phone number [duplicate]

This question already has answers here: Closed 10 years ago.

Possible Duplicate:

A comprehensive regex for phone number validation

How to validate a phone number (NSString *) in objective-c? Rules:

• minimum 7 digits
• maximum 10 digits
• the first digit must be 2开发者_运维技巧, 3, 5, 6, 8 or 9

Thanks

---

You can use a regular expressions library (like RegexKit, etc), or you could use regular expressions through NSPredicate (a bit more obscure, but doesn't require third-party libraries). That would look something like this:

NSString *phoneNumber = ...;
NSString *phoneRegex = @"[235689][0-9]{6}([0-9]{3})?"; 
NSPredicate *test = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"SELF MATCHES %@", phoneRegex]; 
BOOL matches = [test evaluateWithObject:phoneNumber];

If you're on iPhone, then iOS 4 introduced NSRegularExpression, which would also work. The NSPredicate approach works on both Mac and iPhone (any version).

---

Please don't use your own regex for the phone-number. Don't.

The format of phone numbers changes across the country, and your app might be used outside of your own country.

Instead, use what Apple provides, as Josh says. See here.

---

For those searching for phone extraction, you can extract the phone numbers from a text, for example:

NSString *userBody = @"This is a text with 30612312232 my phone";
if (userBody != nil) {
    NSError *error = NULL;
    NSDataDetector *detector = [NSDataDetector dataDetectorWithTypes:NSTextCheckingTypePhoneNumber error:&error];
    NSArray *matches = [detector matchesInString:userBody options:0 range:NSMakeRange(0, [userBody length])];
    if (matches != nil) {
        for (NSTextCheckingResult *match in matches) {
            if ([match resultType] == NSTextCheckingTypePhoneNumber) {
                DbgLog(@"Found phone number %@", [match phoneNumber]);
            }
        }
    }
}

`

---

The NSDataDetector class, available in iOS 4.0 and later, is a specialized subclass of NSRegularExpression that has explicit support for detecting phone numbers.

---

In iOS 4.0+ there are built in classes to do this, NSRegularExpression

In everything else you can either use a 3rd party RegEx library, or use an NSPredicate if your needs are narrow enough