If you want to convert a US phone number into the format xxx-xxx-xxxx, then you can use this nice simple function.

sub convert_tel {
	my $tel = $_[0];
	if ($tel =~ /^\d+$/) {
		$tel =~ s/([\d]{3,3})/$1-/g;
		$tel =~ s/\-$//g;
		return $tel;
	} else {
		return $tel;
	}
}

That would convert a 10 digit number into 123-123-123-1. However, it would be nicer to have it formatted as xxx-xxx-xxxx, so to get that lets do this regex instead:

$tel =~ s/([\d]{3,3})([\d]{3,3})([\d]{3,4})/$1-$2-$3/g;

Simply call with:

print convert_tel("123412341234");

Thats about it =)

Categories: Perl Coding

Tags: number, perl, phone, regex