Not gonna lie, that vertical alignment is making my brain purr like a kitten
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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the fact that these are strings instead of an object that is broken up by country code, area code, and number makes me irrationally angry.
You absolute buffoon. How do you figure this code isn't testing how to parse a string into such an object??
Country codes are variable. Even the "I'm about to dial another country prefix" (usually + resolves to 00 but that depends on country and carrier) is variable. Phone number lengths are variable. Phone numbers are often written in non-Arabic numerals. Phone numbers can have specific digits in the middle of the number to reroute the call to another carrier.
You can try to parse phone numbers if you're writing a specific phone number parsing library, but you'll need to keep up with the ITU documents, the numbering plans of all countries and satellite providers, and provide support for older standards going back to the 60s. You'll need to deal with edge cases that your language probably doesn't even have names for. And most importantly, you'll have to guess what country the phone number is from based on context clues such as the user's language or location or locale because phone numbers can be and are reused across borders.
Phone numbers are worse than time zones. Don't parse them yourself unless you're building an international phone interconnect.
Better than an integer at least.
"The number" is itself two parts hence the dash. The first section being the prefix and the last part being the line number.
i think you think that telephone numbers are well-structured. they are not. they are messy. they do not fit a certain schematic.
I recommend also the following topic: "people have names". https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
Names do not in general fit into the schematic "first name, last name"
Is there not a "falsehoods programmers think about phone numbers" yet?
Edit: And once again, I'm still confused about some of these. Do we need to expand unicode for names? It's supposed to be universal. WTF is up with 40?
https://github.com/google/libphonenumber/blob/master/FALSEHOODS.md has falsehoods about phone numbers.
WTF is up with 40?
People have names.
I suppose that a counterexample to this might be Tibetan children, who get named at puberty, IIRC. Before that, they have no names. They are just referred to as "child" or "somebody's child".
People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
I suppose a counterexample to that might be cultures which do not use script in general. Then, obviously, there's no Unicode characters for these non-existant glyphs.
Ah, so it dovetails with the whole "children get a name reasonably fast" thing. I was interpreting that as "ever, in a natural lifespan". My bad, haha.
I suppose a counterexample to that might be cultures which do not use script in general. Then, obviously, there’s no Unicode characters for these non-existant glyphs.
True, but there's little risk of a name being entered into a form without some kind of transcription.
Could be tests for a parser to convert it from string to object.
Not like your end users are going to type each piece into a separate field.
Found the Java programmer...
microsoft java :p
You seem to enjoy overengineering your code, don't you?
I think it's commendable to vertically align code. (Just not with tabs.) It makes it look neater.
We underutilize tabs. https://nick-gravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
(Don't mistake this as me saying everyone should start using tabs immediately. This would take a drastic overhaul of all textual displays and we're likely to never see such a thing, but it's still a cool concept.)
Good to see tabs' fundamental flaw was solved. I think I'll be switching to this.
You can't unless the tools you're using to display tabs do it like this. None do, apart from the proof of concept programs on the site.
But it is a cool idea.
I think i saw a vscode plugin on the page
It's not "solved." Not trying to dive into yet another tabs vs. spaces argument. But this is just another example of how tabs can be pretty neat when they're interpreted in a specific way. But it's up to your editor, plugin, etc. to do so. Take the same text and throw it into an editor that doesn't use this same interpretation, and it immediately falls apart.
Without monospacing....
Junior devs don’t know Jenny.
It's true. Who's Jenny, for the zoomers in the chat?
It was a very popular song in the 80s. Jenny’s phone number was 867-5309.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/867-5309/Jenny
If you’re ever at a store and need a frequent shopper card, this number with your local area code is usually registered.
Interesting how Wikipedia handles slashes in the title.
Good to know! Although I have to wonder if that's true for programs more recently set up as well. That was >40 years ago.
I suspect most reasonably populated areas it works.
Could have stopped the meme at the top text to be honest
Tell me you are 40-50 without telling me