I have seen a few question on SO similar to what I require but nothing seems to fit the bill.
I am in the position where I need to deal with a call record and determine the country using the phone number. The number dialed can be any country for example:
44 7899455120 - UK
34 965791845 - Spain
355 788415235 - Albania
Obviously the world would be great if all calling codes were two digits but this is not the case. Currently I have a database full of countries and their relevant codes and in order to match I need to effectively take the first digit of the number ie 4 for the UK example and do a query of the database eg:
SELECT * from countries WHERE code LIKE '4%'
This may give me for example 20 results. So I loop again and do say
SELECT * from countries WHERE code LIKE '44%'
This may give me say one result, now I can determine it is UK. Some codes however like Albania are three digits and require more loops and database calls. This seems quite rudimentary and inefficient but as is I cannot think of another way to achieve this. I realise three calls to a database may not seem like much but if you have 1000 calls to deal with they soon add up.
Looking at the following question:
What regular expression will match valid international phone numbers?
There seems to be some great information on validating a number against country codes, but not so much on determining the country code from a number. Any advice or suggestions on a cleaner method would be much appreciated.
Spaces in the phone are shown for clarity
