Search pattern that will match only U.S. phone numbers

Dear smart DT folk:

I need to sift through a heap of documents (mostly PDF’s) to find all the phone numbers they contain. Of course, all these docs are in my snazzy DTP 2 database.

I tried searching with this pattern, looking for area codes:
([1-9][1-9][1-9])

But I could really use some help revising that so that the pattern matches the variety of formats people use for U.S. phone numbers, such as:
(XXX) XXX-XXXX
XXX-XXX-XXXX
XXX.XXX.XXXX

Thanks!

These two patterns should work and accept your examples:

“[0-9][0-9][0-9] [0-9][0-9][0-9] [0-9][0-9][0-9]”
“[0-9][0-9][0-9] [0-9][0-9][0-9] [0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9]”

But due to a bug they don’t. The next beta will hopefully fix this, I have to investigate this first.

Thanks, Christian!

Need some direction on how to make and use patterns.

Thanks

What’s the format of the phone numbers?

xxx-xxx-xxx

what I don’t know is where to define this.

Is it a search set or a plugin ?
Or a plugin inside a search set ?

Thanks

It’s just a search term, therefore you could use “[0-9][0-9][0-9] [0-9][0-9][0-9] [0-9][0-9][0-9]” as the secondary query in a search set or in the search window.