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Comment by doodpants | Hacker News Reader

> If you put a phone number form and the user put letters inside, you will just say "invalid number". You won't try to parse it.

Wait, what? Phone numbers could always include letters. Many businesses get phone numbers that include or consist of words relevant to their business, to make them memorable. And I've known people whose personal number happens to contain a word or words, so they give the letter version out because it's easy to remember. If a phone number field doesn't include simple logic to map letters into the proper numbers, that's just lazy programming.

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That's an american way of seing things (and is only a thing in very few countries), because all your letters are on the num pad. But 555-فودكا is not going to work.

And what next, do you accept exotic unicode numbers ? Letters that you casefold to something that can make to a number ?

Again, you draw the line somewhere. There is no right place for the line, it depends of your business, but there is always a line of what you accept as a user input.

Being offended won't help you on HN, and calling out people names either.

The letters all correspond to numbers. I don't think most applications with phone numbers really need to support putting 1-800-FLOWERS instead of the real number.

Wait what? There are countries that put letters into phone NUMBERS?

The numbers all have three or four letters above them and people (mostly businesses, really) will sometimes get a number that spells out a memorable mnemonic. That's all he's talking about.

This is what the average phone bad looks like in the United States:

http://www.pachd.com/free-images/technology-images/phone-dia...

There is a standard, universal mapping of letters onto numbers. This allows companies to advertise their phone number as something memorable like 1-800-CASH-4-AU and everyone knows how to dial it. People don't even need to remember the mapping of letters, because they're printed on every keypad.

Used to be common in the US. You'd have two letters for the exchange, then five digits for the telephone number.

Well there are the A B C and D DTMF tones not sure if those technically count as numbers and from memory they are without the ITU spec for a phone numbers.

In the US, phone numbers started with 2 letters well into the 1960s. They were usually the first 2 letters of the street name the nearest telephone exchange was on. My grandfather's address book was full of numbers still written that way.

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