RE: Format Phone number

>Which brings us back to Michael's earlier recommendation that you
>don't hard-code any particular national convention regarding how
>phone numbers should be formatted.

Actually, I think it is as unhelpful to insist that all users treat
all applications as if they were in use world wide as to insist that
all users use a local convention.

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For users Tommie is right, for good programming practice Dr. Kay has a point.  There is a Regular Expression that will validate any North American phone number given in the Perl Cookbook.  For a user that might be the end of the discussion.  However, a programmer can still commit a meta data error in a web form by requiring both requiring the field content AND validation.  An "out of area" bypass checkbox would enable field content OR validation.

Not blaming the user involves some commercial risk, but not a logical dilemma.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on him not understanding it."  --Upton Sinclair