Python validation mobile number

Question

I'm trying to validate a mobile number, the following is what I have done so far, but it does not appear to work.

I need it to raise a validation error when the value passed does not look like a mobile number. Mobile numbers can be 10 to 14 digits long, start with 0 or 7, and could have 44 or +44 added to them.

def validate_mobile(value):
    """ Raise a ValidationError if the value looks like a mobile telephone number.
    """
    rule = re.compile(r'/^[0-9]{10,14}$/')

    if not rule.search(value):
        msg = u"Invalid mobile number."
        raise ValidationError(msg)

Answer 1

I would recommend to use the phonenumbers package which is a python port of Google's libphonenumber which includes a data set of mobile carriers now:

import phonenumbers
from phonenumbers import carrier
from phonenumbers.phonenumberutil import number_type

number = "+49 176 1234 5678"
carrier._is_mobile(number_type(phonenumbers.parse(number)))

This will return True in case number is a mobile number or False otherwise. Note that the number must be a valid international number or an exception will be thrown. You can also use phonenumbers to parse phonenumber given a region hint.

Answer 2

The following regex matches your description

r'^(?:\+?44)?[07]\d{9,13}$'