Regular Expressions
Posted on July 11, 2007
TextPad® is a powerful, general purpose editor for plain text files. I have used it for years and recommend it highly. One of the best features is that you can do ‘find and replace’ requests using regular expressions.
I found a good set of regular expressions for finding phone numbers in text files. In the interest of saving you from reinventing the wheel, here they are.
The “^” character means that it will find only phone numbers that begin at the first character of the line. If you don’t want that, remove the “^”.
For numbers formatted like ###-###-#### or ###.###.####
^[0-9]\{3\}[-.][0-9]\{3\}[-.][0-9]\{4\}
For numbers formatted like (###)###-#### or (###)###.####
^[(][0-9]\{3\}[)][0-9]\{3\}[-.][0-9]\{4\}
For numbers formatted like (###) ###-####
^[(][0-9]\{3\}[)][[:space:]][0-9]\{3\}[-.][0-9]\{4\}
PsPad is another great text editor. It has an FTP feature that allows you to work on files on a server in real-time. The regular expressions for PsPad are as follows:
For numbers formatted like ###-###-#### or ###.###.####
^[0-9]{3}[-.][0-9]{3}[-.][0-9]{4}
For numbers formatted like (###)###-#### or (###)###.####
^[\(][0-9]{3}[\)][0-9]{3}[-.][0-9]{4}
For what it is worth, TextPad is a better utility if you are trying to clean up text files. PsPad is better if you are working on files that are on a web server. I use PsPad for development and TextPad for things like regular expression finds.
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