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On Tue, 9 Sep 1997 John Lord asked about telephone numbers:
> We initially decided to use spaces between the groups of numbers because
> European telephone numbers seem to do so:
>
> +44 1344 200000
> +1 510 555 1212
> 800 555 1212
> ...
> 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.
>
> Has anyone determined a convention that works for all kinds of readers of
> all kinds of telephone numbers? Any information on this subject would be
> helpful!
There are no official standard (except for the "+"), but to my
experience this format will be properly understood by most people as
it is a growing de-facto standard:
+<country code>-<area code excl. area code prefix>-<rest of the
tel. number>.
The "+" indicates a complete "international telephone number" and
when dialling, the + should be replaced by the digits to dial for
international calls, in most (but far from all) contries it is 00.
The "area code" is to be dialled from outside the area, only.
Example 1: Belgium has country code 32 and Bruxelles is area code 02.
In Belgium, the 0 in the area code indicates "area code" (in other
countries it may be anoter digit, e.g. 9 in Finland), and must not be
dialed from abroad, so that's omitted. A Bruxelles telephone number
should consequently be written +32-2-12.345.67.
Example 2: In Denmark (country code 45) we don't use area codes any
more. A Danish telephone number should consequently be written
+45-1234 5678.
Whether you use "." or " " to separate the remaining groups, and how
to split the number in groups is up to national tradition. There are
no rules at all. You will have to check by country if there are
rules at all.
Some people use a comma (,) for separating the local ext. number from
the public number, e.g. +45-1234 5678,345 for local ext. 345. The
comma should consequently not be used for dividing number groups.
In some countries, there is a tradition for using a "/" instead of
the "-" in the international telephone numbers, but in practice it
doesn't matter.
This format has the advantage, that you don't need to know about the
national system to dial from abroad, and nationally you will know
exactly what to dial from where. Remember, that in many countries
(e.g. Germany), the number of digits are not fixed.
Greetings from Denmark
Peter Ring
PRC (Peter Ring Consultants)
- specialists in user friendly manuals and audits on manuals.
prc -at- isa -dot- dknet -dot- dk http://isa.dknet.dk/~prc
- the "User Friendly Manuals" website with links, bibliography, list
of prof. associations, and tips for technical writers.
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