Text Processing with JavaScript

Recipe 34

Using Special Replacement Patterns

Task

Imagine you have a private group web page where members agreed to share their contact information with other members. You don’t want to impose any restrictions on the phone number format the website accepts other than it should consist of ten digits. So, a user might enter 123-456-7890, 123 456 7890, or (123)4567890.

But you want to transform the digits into a formatted phone number so they will display consistently, like [phone], throughout the website. To achieve this, you first need to remove any existing formatting from the number and then format it the way you want.

Solution

Remove all formatting by replacing non-digit characters with an empty string:

part_2/replacement_patterns/replacement_ex1_p1.js ...