Remove unwanted characters from phone number string

Question

I am aiming for regex code to grab phone number and remove unneeded characters.

import re
strs = 'dsds +48 124 cat cat cat245 81243!!'
match = re.search(r'.[ 0-9\+\-\.\_]+', strs)

if match:                      
    print 'found', match.group() ## 'found word:cat'
else:
    print 'did not find'

It returns only:

+48 124 

How I can return the entire number?

Answer 1

You want to use sub(), not search():

>>> strs = 'dsds +48 124 cat cat cat245 81243!!'
>>> re.sub(r"[^0-9+._ -]+", "", strs)
' +48 124   245 81243'

[^0-9+._ -] is a negated character class. The ^ is significant here - this expression means: "Match a characters that is neither a digit, nor a plus, a dot, an underscore, a space or a dash".

The + tells the regex engine to match one or more instances of the preceding token.

Answer 2

The problem with re.sub() is that you get extra spaces in your final phone number string. The non-regular expression way, which returns the correct phone number (without any spaces):

>>> strs = 'dsds +48 124 cat cat cat245 81243!!'
>>> ''.join(x for x in strs if x.isdigit() or x == '+')
'+4812424581243'