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PHP

Posted by Stu Cowley
Stu Cowley
26,287 Points

Adding Spaces to Numerals in PHP

Hey guys,

So I've finally got the confidence in PHP to actually start using it, but I need to know one small detail about using numbers, especially with phone numbers.

I have a list of phone numbers for an array of cafe's in my local area. I have added all of them to an associative array and it's running exactly how I want it seems a bit silly to use a string for phone numbers.

So you get a basic idea of what I'm looking to do I've included a code snippet

array('Cafe Lime', '3 Railway Terrace, Goolwa', '8555 2011')

When I just declare the phone number as a set of numbers instead of a string I can't simply add the space to the number to format it nicely or else I get odd results.

I hope I've made some sense.

Thanking you in advance

Stu :)

3 Answers

Jason Anello
Jason Anello
Courses Plus Student 94,610 Points

Hi Stu,

I wouldn't say it's silly to use a string for phone numbers. You're not going to be doing mathematical operations on phone numbers so they don't really need to be numbers.

I don't know if you will have leading zero's but that will be a problem if storing as numbers.

Ron McCranie
Ron McCranie
7,837 Points
Ron McCranie
Ron McCranie
7,837 Points

you could make a helper function for formatting the number from the integer format you're storing it as to a sting when you display it. Assuming the phone numbers follow a simple pattern like "#### ####" you could make one phone() function to format it.

function phone($number) {
    return substr($number, 0,4).' '.substr($number, 4);
}

Then your code above, when showing the data could be

array('Cafe Lime', '3 Railway Terrace, Goolwa', phone(85552011));
Stu Cowley
Stu Cowley
26,287 Points
Stu Cowley
Stu Cowley
26,287 Points

Thanks guy,

Jason Anello that makes really good sense! Thanks so much. As I'm new to the language I just want to be sure I'm doing things correctly.

Ron McCranie thanks also for you input, I have added your advice to my PHP Bible notebook for future reference as I feel that this would be extremely handy down the track!

Thanks again,

Stu : )