regex validating telephone number, but chops white space using perl - regex

Question

So I have an HTML field in a form that takes in a phone number. It validates it correctly when I use () or / or - however, if I put in say 555 123 4567, it returns 555. As always your help is greatly appreciates it.
Here is my code
my $userName=param("userName");
my $password=param("password");
my $phoneNumber=param("phoneNumber");
my $email=param("email");
my $onLoad=param("onLoad");
my $userNameReg = "[a-zA-Z0-9_]+";
my $passwordReg = "([a-zA-Z]*)([A-Z]+)([0-9]+)";
my $phoneNumberReg = "((\(?)([2-9]{1}[0-9]{2})(\/|-|\)|\s)?([2-9]{1}[0-9]{2})(\/|-|\s)?([0-9]{4}))";
my $emailReg = "([a-zA-Z0-9_]{2,})(#)([a-zA-Z0-9_]{2,})(.)(com|COM)";
if ($onLoad !=1)
{
#controlValue = ($userName, $password, $phoneNumber, $email);
#regex = ($userNameReg, $passwordReg, $phoneNumberReg, $emailReg);
#validated;
for ($i=0; $i<4; $i++)
{
$retVal= validatecontrols ($controlValue[$i], $regex[$i]);
if ($retVal)
{
$count++;
}
if (!$retVal)
{
$validated[$i]="*"
}
}
sub validatecontrols
{
my $ctrlVal = shift();
my $regexVal = shift();
if ($ctrlVal =~ /^$regexVal$/)
{
return 1;
}
return 0;
}
}
*html code is here*

Answer 1

I realize that this is part of an assignment, so you may be working under specific restraints. However, your attempt to abstract out your data validation is honestly just making things messy and harder to follow. It also ties you down to specifically regex tests, which may not actually be the best bet. As has already been said, email validation should be done via a module.
Also, for this phone validation, an easier solution is just to strip out anything that isn't a number, and then do your validation test. The below code demonstrates what I'm talking about:
my $userName = param("userName");
my $password = param("password");
my $phoneNumber = param("phoneNumber");
my $email = param("email");
my $onLoad = param("onLoad");
my $error = 0;
if ($onLoad !=1)
{
if ($username !~ /^[a-zA-Z0-9_]+$/) {
$username = '*';
$error++;
}
if ($password !~ /^[a-zA-Z]*[A-Z]+[0-9]+$/) {
$password = '*';
$error++;
}
(my $phoneNumOnly = $phoneNumber) =~ s/\D//g;
if ($phoneNumOnly !~ /^1?[2-9]{1}\d{2}[2-9]{1}\d{6}$/) {
$phoneNumber = '*';
$error++;
}
if ($email !~ /^\w{2,}\#\w{2,}\.com$/i) {
$email = '*';
$error++;
}
}
*html code is here*

Answer 2

That regex you're using looks a overly complicated. You have a lot of capturing groups in there, but I get the feeling you're mostly using them to define "OR" statements with the vertical bar. It's usually a lot easier to just use brackets for this purpose if you're only selecting single characters. Also, it's not a good idea to use\s for normal spaces, since this will actually match any whitespace character (tabs and newlines). Maybe try something like this:
(?:\(?[2-9]\d{2}\)?[-\/ ]?)?[2-9]\d{2}[-\/ ]?\d{4}