Thread: preg_match tells me numbers are symbols!

Thanks eveyone for their help. It's all sorted now due to my complete ignorance on how regular expressions work. however with your suggestions and lots of reading I got it to do just what I want! It now checks for an empty string and checks for the dodgy charaters in the string. I've set it to allow 0-9 -+() and spaces. It doens't check for formatting because as suggested tyhis can have so many variants. So you will get one of...

Try this: PHP Code: $pattern = '/((\(\d{3}\)?)|(\d{3}))([\s-+]?)(\d{3})([\s-]?)(\d{4})/' ; if(! preg_match ( $pattern , $number )) {    // error code } else {    // success }

I don't think you want to negate ("!") the preg_match(), as you want the if condition to be true if it finds anything that is not a 0-9, correct?

Quote: Originally Posted by fisicx Thanks jaql, What I want to do is check the whole string for anything other than 0-9, the symbols +-() and a space. If there is an match then the error message asks the user to check their telephone number. I could easily strip out the offending characters but I'm trying to be a little more helpful. Suggestion please? My suggestion would be to strip out offending characters, look at what numbers you...