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Laravel Phone

Adds phone number functionality to Laravel based on the PHP port of libphonenumber by Google.

Table of Contents

• Demo
• Installation
• Validation
• Attribute casting
• Utility class
  • Formatting
  • Number information
  • Equality comparison
• Database considerations

Demo

Check out the behavior of this package in the demo.

Installation

Run the following command to install the latest applicable version of the package:

The Service Provider gets discovered automatically by Laravel.

In your languages directory, add an extra translation in every validation.php language file:

Validation

Use the phone keyword in your validation rules array or use the Propaganistas\LaravelPhone\Rules\Phone rule class to define the rule in an expressive way.

To put constraints on the allowed originating countries, you can explicitly specify the allowed country codes.

Or to make things more dynamic, you can also match against another data field holding a country code. For example, to require a phone number to match the provided country of residence. Make sure the country field has the same name as the phone field but with _country appended for automatic discovery, or provide your custom country field name as a parameter to the validator:

Note: country codes should be ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 compliant.

To support any valid internationally formatted phone number next to the whitelisted countries, use the INTERNATIONAL parameter. This can be useful when you're expecting locally formatted numbers from a specific country but also want to accept any other foreign number entered properly:

To specify constraints on the number type, append the allowed types to the parameters, e.g.:

The most common types are mobile and fixed_line, but feel free to use any of the types defined here.

Prepend a type with an exclamation mark to blacklist it instead. Note that you can never use whitelisted and blacklisted types at the same time.

You can also enable lenient validation by using the LENIENT parameter. With leniency enabled, only the length of a number is checked instead of actual carrier patterns.

Attribute casting

Two cast classes are provided for automatic casting of Eloquent model attributes:

Both classes automatically cast the database value to a PhoneNumber object for further use in your application.

When setting a value, they both accept a string value or a PhoneNumber object. The RawPhoneNumberCast mutates the database value to the raw input number, while the E164PhoneNumberCast writes a formatted E.164 phone number to the database.

In case of RawPhoneNumberCast, the cast needs to be hinted about the phone country in order to properly parse the raw number into a phone object. In case of E164PhoneNumberCast and the value to be set is not already in some international format, the cast needs to be hinted about the phone country in order to properly mutate the value.

Both classes accept cast parameters in the same way:

1. When a similar named attribute exists, but suffixed with _country (e.g. phone_country), the cast will detect and use it automatically.
2. Provide another attribute's name as a cast parameter
3. Provide one or several country codes as cast parameters

Important note: Both casts expect valid phone numbers in order to smoothly convert from/to PhoneNumber objects. Please validate phone numbers before setting them on a model. Refer to the validation documentation to learn how to validate phone numbers.

⚠️ Attribute assignment and E164PhoneNumberCast

Due to the nature of E164PhoneNumberCast a valid country attribute is expected if the number is not passed in international format. Since Laravel applies casts instantly when setting an attribute, be sure to set the country attribute before setting the phone number attribute. Otherwise E164PhoneNumberCast will encounter an empty country value and throw an unexpected exception.

Utility PhoneNumber class

A phone number can be wrapped in the Propaganistas\LaravelPhone\PhoneNumber class to enhance it with useful utility methods. It's safe to directly reference these objects in views or when saving to the database as they will degrade gracefully to the E.164 format.

Alternatively you can use the phone() helper function. It returns a Propaganistas\LaravelPhone\PhoneNumber instance or the formatted string if $format was provided:

Formatting

A PhoneNumber can be formatted in various ways:

Number information

Get some information about the phone number:

Equality comparison

Check if a given phone number is (not) equal to another one:

Database considerations

Disclaimer: Phone number handling is quite different in each application. The topics mentioned below are therefore meant as a set of thought starters; support will not be provided.

Storing phone numbers in a database has always been a speculative topic and there's simply no silver bullet. It all depends on your application's requirements. Here are some things to take into account, along with an implementation suggestion. Your ideal database setup will probably be a combination of some of the pointers detailed below.

Uniqueness

The E.164 format globally and uniquely identifies a phone number across the world. It also inherently implies a specific country and can be supplied as-is to the phone() helper.

You'll need:

• One column to store the phone number
• To format the phone number to E.164 before persisting it

Example:

• User input = 012/45.65.78
• Database column
  • phone (varchar) = +3212456578

Presenting the phone number the way it was inputted

If you store formatted phone numbers the raw user input will unretrievably get lost. It may be beneficial to present your users with their very own inputted phone number, for example in terms of improved user experience.

You'll need:

• Two columns to store the raw input and the correlated country

Example:

• User input = 012/34.56.78
• Database columns
  • phone (varchar) = 012/34.56.78
  • phone_country (varchar) = BE

Supporting searches

Searching through phone numbers can quickly become ridiculously complex and will always require deep understanding of the context and extent of your application. Here's a possible approach covering quite a lot of "natural" use cases.

You'll need:

• Three additional columns to store searchable variants of the phone number:
  • Normalized input (raw input with all non-alpha characters stripped)
  • National formatted phone number (with all non-alpha characters stripped)
  • E.164 formatted phone number
• Probably a saving() observer (or equivalent) to prefill the variants before persistence
• An extensive search query utilizing the searchable variants

Example:

• User input = 12/34.56.78

• Observer method:

• Database columns
  • phone_normalized (varchar) = 12345678
  • phone_national (varchar) = 012345678
  • phone_e164 (varchar) = +3212345678
• Search query: