In an app with about 10% international entries, we put the Country field before the phone fields. If the country field is blank or contains USA or Canada we use the (999) 999-9999 approach, with 6 trailing spaces for extension values. (makes a total of 20, a nice round number). However, if the country is India, Mexico, Japan etc. then the textbox is unformatted, allowing users to enter any combination of digits and symbols.

We've had 2 complaints in 3 years, both from non-US customers who had clicked on the Phone field before entering their address - and of course got US formatting. So we added a screen message that the telephone number was formatted according to country entry. We're thinking about adding the country phone code to the country table and entering it automatically in the Phone fields.


>Anyone care to share their favorite method of formatting text box for US phone numbers? I've been using Format "R" and InputMask "(999) 999-9999". Is that the preferred method?
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>TIA