Telephone Number Standardization Files

Only one configuration file is used to define standardization logic for processing telephone numbers. The process definition file (standardizer.xml) defines the state model and logic for processing telephone numbers. There is only one variant for the PhoneNumber data type that is designed to handle telephone numbers from all countries. The files that make up the variant are stored in the master index project under PhoneNumber/Generic. The process definition file is located in the resource subdirectory. You can customize this file to fit your processing and standardization requirements for telephone numbers. For more information about the structure of this file, see Process Definition File.

Telephone number standardization has several states, each defining how to process tokens when they are found in certain orders. The default file defines states for country codes, area codes, phone numbers, and extensions. It defines provisions for instances when the fields do not appear in order or when the input string does not contain complete data. For example, the current definition handles instances where the input string begins with a country code or an area code, where it contains an extension, where it does not contain an extension, and when it contains multiple telephone numbers.

The process definition file for telephone numbers define several parsing rules for each field component. This file defines a set of cleansing rules to prepare the input string prior to any processing. Then the data is passed to the start state of the FSM. Most fields are matched against regular expressions and then postprocessed by replacing regular expressions. The output symbols are further processed by concatenating the digit groups of the actual phone number, separated by a hyphen.