'+' character added to the start of PayPal customer phone number failing validation.

[futurity]

We have set up our Actinic site to use Paypal and have come accross the following problem. The customer fills in their contact details in the invoice form and clicks next to move on to the paypal website. Even though we only accept UK orders, the phone number passed to PayPal seems to have been prefixed with a ‘+’ plus character.

When the customer enters their credit card details and hits the submit “Review order and continue” button, PayPal presents the following error: “Home Telephone: The phone number is not properly formatted”.

The customer then has to manually edit their phone number and remove the ‘+’ character from it before it is accepted by PayPal.

Is there anyway we can get Actinic not to send through the ‘+’ character (which wasn’t even entered to start off with) or is it a Paypal issue adding in the + symbol?

Kind Regards

Neil

[futurity]

Do spaces in the telephone number fix the problem?

Hi again everyone,

Further investigation has shown that PayPal accept phone numbers with a '+' plus character as long as there is a ' ' space character between the '+' or '+44' and the actual phone number.

By default our Actinic v9.0.5 passes PayPal UK numbers without the country code as in +01234567890. If it passed PayPal '+44 01234567890' or '+44 1234567890' (i.e. removing the 0 at the start) PayPal would accept it without any problems.

Does anyone know how to get Actinic to add the missing '44 ' (four four space) after the '+' character and before the phone number? At this stage I'm not too worried about the 0 at the start of the number not being removed.

Many thanks

Neil and Caroline

[Paul Bulpit]

I don't know enough to help you, but could you use a modification to the topic discussed here.

This is a javascript function that is used to Capitalise the first letter of an input field, and also to format a Credit Card number input as a 16 digit string into groups of four digits. Shouldn't be too hard to make it do something with phone numbers?

[futurity]

The problem is that Actinic adds the '+' character not the user, so unfortunately automatic javascript formatting of the phone number the user entered won't really help.

What i need to do is configure Actinic to add the correct country code number (i.e. 44) followed by a space giving '+44 0123456789'.

I suppose i could use javascript to add '44 ' to the start of the user's entered phone number (also removing the first 0 if i want to get really advanced).

Saying this, surely there must be an easier way?

Neil