validate phone number using regular expression

February 6, 2022

Here is my code:

def phone_number(number_input):
    """validate user input of phone number"""
while True:
    number_input = print(input("Please enter your phone number: "))
    if  re.search("\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}" ,number_input):
        print("You phone number is: " + number_input)
        break
    else:
        print("Please enter a valid phone number ex. 123-456-5678")


phone_number(number_input)

The code does not do the job of validation and I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\ablev\eclipse-workspace\matrix\matrix.py", line 13, in <module>
    if  re.search("\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}" ,number_input):
  File "C:\Users\ablev\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python310\lib\re.py", line 200, in search
    return _compile(pattern, flags).search(string)
TypeError: expected string or bytes-like object

>Solution :

The print() function does not return anything. So you need to store input() first then print() if you want it.

Moreover your code, while working with the modification, does not make sense. So I modified to define a real function which return the phone number if valid.

import re

def phone_number():
    """validate user input of phone number"""
    while True:
        number_input = input("Please enter your phone number: ")
        print(number_input)
        if  re.search("\d{3}-\d{3}-\d{4}" ,number_input):
            print("You phone number is: " + number_input)
            return number_input
        else:
            print("Please enter a valid phone number ex. 123-456-5678")


number_input = phone_number()