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>
> I'm not sure whether European numbers are ever shown separated by hyphens
> or periods instead of spaces---I'm checking with someone in Europe about
> this. I don't know about Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Pacific, or Latin
> American telephone numbering conventions.
Speaking from experience of Asia [The Subcontinent/India/Pakistan/Sri
Lanka/Bangladesh/Nepal], Africa [Nigeria, which I hope applies to the rest of
West Africa and other formerly British-Run parts] and The Middle East [Saudi
Arabia is very, very American in English usage and suchlike; other parts are
British in parts], I have this to say:
Bottomline: KNOW THY USER. Saying that you want to do this or that for the
whole country is dangerous. If you are writing for Indian programmers, they
will be moulded in the American mould, having spent most of their
adult/professional lives using American generated software and books. If you
are writing for Bureaucrats, they are very, very British [substitute other
colonial power for other parts of the world]. If you are writing for
Businessmen, they were very British [substitute other colonial power as above]
till about the mid 80's and now are fast adopting American usage. Except for
the ones that export cotton to the EU for a living. It would pay to research
your user base.
Specifics.: I would say the safest is to stay with spaces. The "." [period/full
stop/dot/whathaveyou] is only used in Europe for anything other than a decimal
point <flame away!!> and the dashes are not very common. But a space could not
be interpreted as anything other than a separator, right? <more flame> In fact,
most of us in the Third World [Japan does not qualify] had 5-digit [or even
4-digit] numbers [6 max] till a very small number of years ago, so the
separators just did not exist for us. The "+" sign I think is fast becoming the
usual way [I am avoiding the word "standard" because that might imply an
officially set standard, like those in the EU] to show numbers in another
country.
I would vote for:
+<country code> <other codes, if any> <city code> <number in groups of four
max, starting at the end of the number, e.g. 47 5678 or 678 7658>
Sabahat.
--
Sabahat_Ashraf -at- MentorG -dot- com
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