Write a Regular Expression pattern that looks for phone numbers in the body of the email

Question

In Gmail, all phone numbers get blue linked automatically. I used to manually take away the styles via HTML, but it has become tedious. I recently found out about how Regular Expressions can match the format of a string. So I am wondering if I can write a pattern that matches a phone number format. If it does match, I would like to apply a style to remove the blue link.

Not sure if this is how Regular Expressions even work, but I figured that I would give it a try.

So basically, I would like to find all phone numbers in the email body and apply styles to them if they match the pattern of the Regular Expression.

So far, I have this:

%%[
var @s, @o, @p

set @s = "uajakd0123456789dashdga"
set @p = "1?[\s-]?\(?(\d{3})\)?[\s-]?\d{3}[\s-]?\d{4}"
set @o = RegExMatch(@s, @p, 1)

outputLine(concat("input:  ",@s,"<br>"))
outputLine(concat('pattern: "',@p,'"<br>'))
outputLine(concat("output: ",@o,"<br>"))

]%%

I keep getting an output of only the first three numbers in a phone number of any format when this RegEx renders.

When I do this on RegExr.com, it works. But when I do it in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it does not work. Does anybody have any idea why?

Answer 1

I'll be honest, I don't have a fancy explanation on this, but if you change the return in the RegExMatch function from 1 to 0, it returns the numbers as expected. Likely something to do with zero based numbering in SFMC AMPScript?

Like this: set @o = RegExMatch(@s, @p, 0)

So this:

%%[
var @s, @o, @p

set @s = "uajakd0123456789dashdga"
set @p = "1?[\s-]?\(?(\d{3})\)?[\s-]?\d{3}[\s-]?\d{4}"
set @o = RegExMatch(@s, @p, 1)

outputLine(concat("input:  ",@s,"<br>"))
outputLine(concat('pattern: "',@p,'"<br>'))
outputLine(concat("output: ",@o,"<br>"))

]%%

would become:

%%[
var @s, @o, @p

set @s = "uajakd0123456789dashdga"
set @p = "1?[\s-]?\(?(\d{3})\)?[\s-]?\d{3}[\s-]?\d{4}"
set @o = RegExMatch(@s, @p, 0)

outputLine(concat("input:  ",@s,"<br>"))
outputLine(concat('pattern: "',@p,'"<br>'))
outputLine(concat("output: ",@o,"<br>"))

]%%