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Phone Number Normalization

  • Updated

Purpose

Reformat a phone number to any of the 3 supported formats: (1) international, (2) national, and (3) E164.

 

Category Location: All, Clean or normalize, Data services/ Enrichment

 

Field Description

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  1. Reformat the phone number found in: Select the attribute to reformat.
  2. Based on the country information in: Select the country attribute to base formatting on.
  3. Write the reformatted phone number to: Select or create an attribute to contain the formatted data.
  4. in Format: 3 Options: International, National, E164.
  5. If there is no usable country information, default to country: If checked, you can type in the country to use for formatting.
  6. Copy unmatched input data to output: If checked, the unformatted original data will be copied to the output attribute.
  7. Advanced Configurations: The reference data source can be changed here - we highly advise using the default reference source.
    • Note: The default reference source uses ISO alpha 2 codes in the country lookup. If you are using the default reference source to normalize phone numbers, you will need to select an attribute containing ISO alpha 2 codes in the country information section (step 2).  

Tips

  • A country attribute is required to look up the country code and the national format. This must be available as an attribute in your data. If you do not have this data, you can manually insert this data, or use the infer task to populate this data.
  • The country code is required to be in the ISO alpha-2 format (i.e. US, CA, DE). If your country data is not already in this format, the task lets you use a Reference Data Source to do the conversion on-the-fly. We recommend the Openprise reference Reference – Countries – Multilingual.
  • The international and E164 formats are the same for all countries.
  • The national format is the preferred format for each country.
  • Any recognizable extensions are standardized to format “ext. 1234”.
  • Any extraneous characters are removed, for example “Direct: (888) 555-1212”, will have "Direct:" removed.
  • If more than one phone number is in the attribute, only the first attribute is retained and reformatted.
  • If the original phone number already has an international area code, this task will not normalize it to another country even if the international area code is different from the country input’s international area code.
  • Phone numbers that have 7 sequential digits (i.e. 345-678-9000 or 987-654-3211) will be flagged.
  • Phone numbers with 7 repeated digits are flagged (i.e. 444-444-4421).
  • If the country value is US, any numbers with an area code and 555-1212 are flagged.
  • If the country value is US, any number with an invalid area code is also flagged.
  • Flagged information is written to a new attribute added to the task output. The attribute is named OP Phone Normalize_Info. 

 

Examples

US phone number “888.555.1212 x123” is reformatted to:

  • International: +1 888-555-1212 ext. 123
  • National: (888) 555-1212 ext. 123
  • E164: 18885551212 ext. 123

 

 

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