Formatting phones to E.164

Question

I'm trying to validate a phone number in the E.164 format using a RegEx, but it doesn't seem to be working.

Here's the RegEx:

java Pattern e164p = Pattern.compile('\+?\d{10,14}');

Error message:

Error: Compile Error: Invalid string literal '\+?\d{10,14}'. Illegal character sequence '\+' in string literal.

Any clue?

Answer 1

Double escape your backslash literals: Pattern.compile('\\+?\\d{10,14}');

(first, the double backslash sequence will be parsed on creation of the string primitive to a literal backslash, then the literal backslash escapes the + and d in your regular expression as you intend)