[Talk-GB] Phone numbers in little England

[Richard Fairhurst]

Colin Smale wrote:
> Calling the transformation from OSM data to international format
> "trivial" does not do justice to the creativity of mappers when 
> entering phone numbers or to telecoms regulators when defining 
> numbering plans.

A quick gander at http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org.uk/keys/phone#values
suggests:

- s/[^0-9]//g
- s/^0/44/

will actually cope with almost every value currently extant. The exceptions
are a few without area code at all, and a few semicolon-delimited multiple
values (which is frowned upon in any case).

> The "four lines of regex" will need to be different for each country

Oh, indeed, but that's the case for most tagging in OSM anyway. Fortunately
OSM is a spatial database so it's easy to do region-specific
transformations!

I don't particularly care about this specific issue because I can't really
envisage circumstances in which I would want to use phone numbers derived
from OSM. What I'm trying to get across is the general point that
non-consumers' attempts to "normalise" tags, thinking that data consumers
will appreciate it, isn't necessarily as helpful as you'd think.

cheers
Richard





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