Pandorabots - Detect Phone, Email, etc - aiml

Question

Good Day.
Does the Pandorabots AIML support complex REGEX? For example, a visitor typed "+1 [phone]" (only or inside some text) and the chatbot must understand that it's a phone#.
Is it possible to use something similar with:
.* (+?\d[.-\s]?\(?\d{3}\)?[.-\s]?\d{3}[.-\s]?\d{4}) .*
GET ONLY -> 1$
If NO - How to correctly detect the phone, email or user name in the user's response.

Answer 1

You can't use REGEX in Pandorabots and will have to write categories yourself to handle this. Here is a basic one that uses the built in set called "number" to recognise phone numbers in the format +1 nnn nnn nnn
<category>
<pattern>1 <set>number</set> <set>number</set> <set>number</set></pattern>
<template>Is that a phone number?</template>
</category>
You can create new sets yourself to validate input, so an improvement on my basic category would be to have a set of 3 digit numbers to validate against, rather than any numbers.
Similarly, you can check for emails by seeing if there are # and . characters in the input. Assuming you are using the standard substitutions, you can create a category like this:
<category>
<pattern>* AT * DOT *</pattern>
<template>Thanks for your email.</template>
</category>