faq.rst

Frequently Asked Questions

Hopefully you can find an answer here to one of your questions. If not, please contact [email protected].

Formatting phone numbers

Twilio always returns phone numbers that are formatted in the E.164 format, like this: +12125551234. However your users may enter them like this: (212) 555-1234. This can lead to problems when, for example, Twilio makes a POST request to your server with the From phone number as +12125551234, but you stored the phone number in your database as (212) 555-1234, causing a database lookup to fail.

We suggest that you convert the number to E.164 format before you store it in the database. The phony gem is excellent for this purpose. Install it like this:

$ gem install phony

Then you can convert user input to phone numbers like this:

require 'phony'

def convert_to_e164(raw_phone)
    Phony.format(
        raw_phone,
        :format => :international,
        :spaces => ''
    ).gsub(/\s+/, "") # Phony won't remove all spaces
end

puts convert_to_e164('212 555 1234')   # prints +12125551234