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841 pages of questions .. if someone has already invented this wheel, I'd appreciate help finding it.

I want to send a phone number in various possible formats (eg 305-888-6160 3058886160 (305) 888-6160) to a variable. (for further use within a program)

The program would start from the cursor being located anywhere within a string of numbers, spaces and punctuation comprising a phone number.

Thanks.

Joe

highlight the text/numbers and ^c to copy it
then u can StringReplace all non-digit characters

I want the program to highlight the phone number string for me. - I want it to figure out what's a phone number and what's not. Clearer?

It's probably possible. A lot depends on the application you are selecting from, the kind of text that surrounds the telephone number, and other factors.

For example, if the telephone numbers appear in this configuration...

John 555-111-2222
Mary 444-111-2222

...and the caret (cursor) lies somewhere on the line the containing the name and number, you could do something like this:

Home ; go to start of line
Shift + End ; select to end of line
Copy to Clipboard
Copy Clipboard to a Variable
Strip out anything in the Variable that is not a number.

This approach selects the line, rather than the number, but the script figures out what is phone number and what is not. Obviously, this approach will not work if you have entries like this:

John 1 555-111-2222
John 2 666-777-8888

If you provide more details, maybe we can provide more help.

Thanks for thinking about this - I appreciate it.

The phone number could appear in a variety of formats (3058886160 305-888-6160 (305) 888-6160) sometimes within a sentence with spaces on both sides of the number and sometimes at the beginning or end of a line of text - we could rule out international numbers and numbers containing letters (1-800-CALLPAIN eg) to keep things fairly straightforward. The phone number would always consist of 10 numbers, but the length of the string containing those 10 numbers might vary depending on the format used.

I'm thinking that the logic of the program would be to examine each character moving in one direction until a character other than (123456789-(){space}) was encountered, then move back the other way using the same test - when both "ends" of the phone number were determined, the string would be highlighted and saved to the clipboard.

I'd be surprised if no one has worked out an algorithm for this sort of search previously - if not - maybe I'll have to start from scratch.

Thanks again for your thoughts.

something like this?:

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Stopwatch emdkplayer
the code i post falls under the: WTFYW-WTFPL license

This statment is important.

Thanks - but the problem is getting the PhoneNr into the program - not stripping out the punctuation. Maybe I can do something with the LOOP function.

Joe

Could you provide us a sample of the data you're trying to extract the phone number from?

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Try Quick Search for Autohotkey or see the tutorial for newbies.

What about to simply extract all digits from the string using RegExMatch() ?

This a sample of (305) 888-6160 text contained in a word document or a text file or outlook journal entry or other 305-888-6160
3058886160 sort of text editing program, like myNoteskeeper which permits the user to select text by holding the shift (b)345-888-6160 ext 2543 (c)305.888.6160 and moving the cursor 3058886160. I don't think I could generalize a method to pickup strings in image files, pdf's or web pages. Thanks for any thoughts.

Joe

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Ternary (a ? b : c) guide     TSV Table Manipulation Library
Post code inside [code][/code] tags!

; Regex = Abracadabra

wow! - This is just the sort of tool I'm looking for - now I know how I'll spend my Saturday. Thanks alot.

Joe

my oldest son told me when he was a small child that the purpose of living was "to meet new people and learn new things" - Well today I learned some new things. Thank you.

Just in case I'm not the only one in the dark, here's what I figured out your code meant:

RegexMatch( Clip, "[(). \-\d]{10,}", phone )
String, "[find arg]", output var
"[().space - any digit](at least 10 digits for a match}"

&& RegexMatch( phone := RegexReplace( phone, "\D" ), "^\d{10}$", phone ) ; nested regex = Ballalaa kazaam

AND set string "phone" = "phone" with any non-digit characters removed
find arg: "or any digit {at least 10 digits long}from the end of the string"

then format it:
FPhone := "(" SubStr( phone, 1, 3 ) ") " SubStr( phone, 4, 3 ) "-" SubStr( phone, 7, 4)
var set to ( 1st 3#s) ) next 3# - next 4#


- Thanks to this tool, I have a nifty little dialer program that will keep me from misdialing numbers all day long. It runs under windows XP, and uses the dialing function of Outlook 2003 or 2007. After I've road tested it for a week or so, if anyone's interested in the code, I'll be happy to share.

Thanks again

Joe