I have an iPhone and no experience with other smart phones. I need to know for an email newsletter and various other online communications for work if all smart phones are able to tell this is a phone number and call it if it appears in text:
(123) 321-4321
This works with my phone. Do any phones require a different format, such as 123-321-4321? Are they all smart enough to know a phone number when they encounter it, and permit you to dial right from where it appears?
Are there any industry standards for this and if so can someone point me to where I can read them?
However - if you think about it from a programming standpoint - (NPA)NXX-XXXX will almost always be a telephone number - while I could see cases where NPA-NXX-XXXX might be a part number or something. So if you were going to err on the side of caution - I’d pick the first - but it probably doesn’t matter.
I would doubt if the phones are looking for an exact match to a standard. The phone numbers on pages are typed in by humans, and as such will show lots of variation. It’s not like the humans are required to follow any sort of written phone number standard. I may write it as 123.456.7890 but you write it as (123) 456-7890. It’s not like either of us are following a standard. As long as neither of us get too crazy with the format, we can recognize it.
As a computer programmer, I would think it’s much more likely that they are looking for the common pattern of groups numbers separated by certain delimiters. They may recognize these as phone numbers:
111.222.3333
111-222-3333
but not this:
111a222b3333
I doubt they’re following any standard. Rather, the programmers know what most of the common phone number patterns look like and search for that.
As an related story, years ago I wrote a program to parse addresses from the on-line classifieds for garage sales. There is an actual standard for addresses used by the post office (geocoding), but that’s not necessarily how humans write their address. I would look for common patterns like “numbers blahblah [ave/rd/road/st/street]” and then convert it into the standard format. Then I would look up those addresses in the tax records to find the most expensive houses having garage sales. I got a lot of great stuff for next to nothing that way. Since these phones are parsing addresses written by humans, I would guess they look for common phone number patterns and then internally convert it to the standard format rather than only look for the standard format.
I just tried a little test on my iPhone 4s.
I sent an email with the following strings.
The ones in bold were automatically turned into hyperlinked phone numbers, the other were not:
**(123) 456-7890
123 456 7890
123-456-7890
**123(456)7890
123456(7890)
**1234567890
**123.4567890
There is no requirement that smartphones must recognize phone numbers. A phone may or may not recognize phone numbers in emails, texts and web pages. It’s completely up to the manufacturer. The nicer phones will do it, but the more basic ones may not have that feature.
This can vary not just by smartphone type, but by the email or browser App in use when viewing a potential number.
I just tried the test Beowulff gave above on my iPhone and iPad. The built in mail App behaved as he notes, but the GMail App does not recognize any of the strings as phone numbers. Likewise, the Web interface in the default Safari browser did not recognize them.
That’s really interesting! (Samsung Galaxy S2) My Gmail and Yahoo both linked the following in bold. Yahoo gave obvious blue hyperlinks, while Gmail did not, but if I tap on the numbers Gmail gave the call or text options for the same ones Yahoo did:
Apple won a lawsuit against HTC, a few years back, because this very feature was in Android. So some smartphones don’t have the feature because of this, methinks.