Java phone number format API

Question

I have a database with millions of phone numbers with free-for-all formatting. Ie, the UI does not enforce any constraints and the users are typing in whatever they want.

What I'm looking for is a Java API that can make a best-effort to convert these into a consistent format. Ideally, the API would take the free text value and a country code and produce a valid international phone number or throw an exception.

For example, a phone number in the system might look like any of the following:

(555) 478-1123 555-478-1123     555.478.1123 5554781123 

Given the country of US, the API would produce the value "+1 (555) 478-1123" for all these. The exact format does not matter, as long as it's consistent.

There are also numbers in the system without area codes, such as "478-1123". In that case, I would expect a NoAreaCodeException, or something similar.

There could also be data such as "abc", which should also throw exceptions.

Of course, there are countless variations of the examples I have posted, as well as the enormous complication of international phone numbers, which have quite complicated validation rules. This is why I would not consider rolling my own.

Has anyone seen such an API?

Answer 1

You could write your own (for US phone # format):

• Strip any non-numeric characters from the string
• Check that the remaining string is ten characters long
• Put parentheses around the first three characters and a dash between the sixth and seventh character.
• Prepend "+1 " to the string

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Update:

Google recently released libphonenumber for parsing, formatting, storing and validating international phone numbers.

Answer 2

You could try this Java phone number formatting library https://github.com/googlei18n/libphonenumber

It has data for hundreds of countries and formats.