Formatting the output of a phone number field

 wayne on April 24, 2008 

I recently, in fact just now ran into an issue formatting a phone.  So I don't lose this info I'm writing this post.

The problem was with formatting the phone number output into a repeater control, so I'm dealing with the DataBinder object.  Here's the DataBinder statement:

<%#FormatPhoneNumber(DataBinder.Eval(Container.DataItem, "Phone1").ToString())%>

So let's break this apart a bit.  FormatPhoneNumber is a function I found from Jason's blog comments so for prosperity I'm going to include it here also:

public string FormatPhoneNumber(string pNum)
{
    try
    {
        if (pNum.Length == 10)
            return String.Format("{0:(###) ###-####}", Int64.Parse(pNum));
        else if (pNum.Length == 7)
            return String.Format("{0:###-####}", Int64.Parse(pNum));
    }
    catch
    {
        //
    }
    return "";
}

I changed it around a little just get er to work.  I'll have to swing back to that later.  Anyway, continuing on we have our standard DataBinder.Eval call.  Another gotcha I had was the .ToString() on the end.  When you have null items in your datasource, you'll throw an error without casting the value to a string.  Silly.  Perhaps now I won't forget.  Thanks for taking part in my brain fart.

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