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Phone

phone_to_alpha2 accepts a string or integer representing a phone number in international format (E.164) and returns the corresponding ISO-3166-1 alpha-2 country code of the phone number's origin. If the input is not a valid phone number, the function returns None.

The code does not validate the syntax of the input number, nor can it match locally formatted phone numbers to an alpha-2 code. If this is a concern, it is recommended to preprocess the phone number first using PhoneWrangler.

A note about Google's libphonenumber

Retrieving a country's alpha-2 code with libphonenumbers is not a straightforward process. The operation requires parsing the result obtained from PhoneNumberOfflineGeocoder using a library like pycountry. In addition, there may be instances when PhoneNumberOfflineGeocoder fails to provide a result, leading to a false negative None value. Both steps are slow in performance, and when working with large datasets, they cause severe performance issues.

CountryWrangler provides an alternative and blazing-fast approach that always delivers a result.

Invalid phone number input may lead to incorrect Alpha-2 country code matching

Please ensure that the input provided is a valid phone number, as almost any numerical input can be matched to an alpha-2 country code. This function does not validate whether the input is a phone number. You can use PhoneWrangler to validate if a given string can be a possible and syntax valid phone number.

Usage Example

Basic Usage
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import countrywrangler as cw

alpha2 = cw.Normalize.phone_to_alpha2("+1 222 333 4444")
print(alpha2)

>>> US
Different Inputs
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import countrywrangler as cw

print(cw.Normalize.phone_to_alpha2("+44"))
print(cw.Normalize.phone_to_alpha2(44))
print(cw.Normalize.phone_to_alpha2("+12223334444"))
print(cw.Normalize.phone_to_alpha2("+1 222 333 4444"))
print(cw.Normalize.phone_to_alpha2(12223334444))
print(cw.Normalize.phone_to_alpha2(345678))             # Not a phone number!           
print(cw.Normalize.phone_to_alpha2("United States"))    # Not a phone number!  

>>> GB
>>> GB
>>> US
>>> US
>>> US
>>> ES
>>> None