These days legislation increasingly places an obligation on processors of personal information to ensure that information is accurate. Input sanitisation and data validation are critical approaches to maintaining accuracy.
I scrounged information about active South African mobile number prefixes using information from the Wikipedia article on South African telephone numbers, a February 2016 post on the Asterisk.org.za mailing list, as well as HLR validation logs.
After munging all of the info from those sources, the following regular expression – as at today – validates all cellphone numbers using known active prefixes in South Africa and excludes the rest.
I took care to try and ensure the regex is as character compact as possible while still providing for all known 3 and 4 digit prefixes.
The regex is:
0((60[3-9]|64[0-5])\d{6}|(7[1-4689]|6[1-3]|8[1-4])\d{7})
An example usage (including start and ending terminators) would be:
SELECT * FROM cellnumber_listing
WHERE NOT (trim(celltelephone) ~ '^0((60[3-9]|64[0-5])\d{6}|(7[1-4689]|6[1-3]|8[1-4])\d{7})$');
Or for Perl Compatible Regular Expression (PCRE):
grep -P '27((60[3-9]|64[0-5])\d{6}|(7[1-4689]|6[1-3]|8[1-4])\d{7})' file.txt
If you have any comments on the above or suggestions how it could be improved, please comment!
Leave a Reply