Phone numbers are not a big deal if you can validate the input at the time you've got a human right there. My enterprise tends not to have that ability, as we receive large files from clients with little or no validation done. Rather than abandon #s which don't validate, I wrote this to parse and normalize a string into a standard NANP phone number, possibly including an extension.
$ irb
>> require "dialable"
>> pn = Dialable::NANP.parse("+1(800)555-1212 ext 1234")
>> puts pn.to_s # Pretty output
800-555-1212 x1234
>> puts pn.to_digits # Address book friendly
8005551212 x1234
>> puts pn.to_dialable # PBX friendly
8005551212
>> puts pn.extension
1234
For v1.0.0
, the timezone syntax from dialable has changed to output tzinfo
compatible names.
Also, pn.timezones and pn.relative_timezones should do the right thing.
The YAML file with the valid area codes and easily recognizable codes (like 911) can get out of date. To update your own copy, run:
cd $(dirname $(gem which dialable)) ; cd ..
ruby ./support/make_yaml_nanpa.rb > data/dialable/nanpa.yaml