Larry David knows all about phone etiquette.
Image source: NBC News
Pick up the phone, baby
I recently worked on improving some phone number validation logic at Winnie. We validate a batch of phone numbers and send them off to a third-party service. Some of the numbers we were sending were deemed invalid by the service. This was preventing us from automating some data updates we wanted to run daily. How hard could validating digits be?
Some validation boxes we already checked off included:
- regex pattern matching to only return digits (e.g. removing non digit characters from 281-330-8004)
- checking if the value is equal to 10 characters (e.g. 2813308004 has no country code)
- checking if the value is equal to 11 characters (e.g. 12813308004 has a country code)
An edge case we were not considering were 800 numbers! A code change went out to ignore these type of phone numbers. The next day we were able to send a new batch of phone numbers to the third-party with no issues. Problem solved? Not quite.
Man with a plan
We were still sending them invalid phone numbers. Perfectly-looking phone numbers were being deemed invalid by them. For example, 234-911-5678 is an invalid phone number. How? There are no non-digit characters and it looks like a valid phone number!
It turns out there is something called the North American Numbering Plan. Under the modern plan, a U.S. phone number must adhere to the NPA-NXX-xxxx format. Each component in this format must follow certain rules. The valid range for the first digit in the NPA component is 2-9. The valid range for each digit in the xxxx component is 0-9. 123-234-5678 is invalid because the first digit is a 1. In the example above, 234-911-5678 was invalid because it violated the following rule: the second and third digit in the NXX component can't both be 1.
I was determined to avoid translating these rules to brittle Python code. I knew there had to be a solution we could leverage instead of reinventing the wheel.
1-800-GOOGLE-IT
What does a software engineer do when they're stuck? Turn to Google. Here are some search queries I tried:
- "npa nxx validator"
- "npa nxx github"
- "npa nxx python"
def is_valid(self):
"""
checks whether the number supplied is actually valid
"""
return phonenumbers.is_valid_number(self)
is_valid_number to get the method definition but got nothing. I realized that phonenumbers was an external package that the project relied on. I immediately Googled the package, skimmed the README and tested it with our invalid phone numbers. It worked! I was confident that this package was enough for our needs and soon it found a home in our requirements.txt file.
Can you hear me now?
Would I have saved 5 minutes by skipping straight to the README instead of browsing the source code? Sure. But being able to read code, especially code that you didn't write, is a useful skill. Plus, GitHub has made it even easier to navigate code on their platform. Can you tell I'm a fan of GitHub?
Googling is a skill. Reading source code is a skill. Reading documentation is a skill. Combine these skills with communicating effectively and what do you get? Probably something better than a 10x engineer.