Wsrtjtyk

I have a dataset like below and the telephone numbers are in different digits and formats.

Would you help me ordering them into a standard format using R?

TelephoneData <- data.frame(

  FIRST = c("STAN", "FIONA", "JOHN", "VERA", "ROBERT", "ANGIE", "PAUL", "GEORGE", "JUDITH", "TREVOR", "KEN", "BRIAN", "GLADYS", "MARY", "MARY", "JOSHUA", 

            "BRIAN", "PHILLIP", "KATE", "BRIAN"),

  PHONE = c("+44 1152 195298", "07366 602865", "01160 979447", "01597 501161", "01232 637283", "01296 230679", "(07183) 151418", "(07995) 376450", 

            "(0208) 0511522", "+44 208 3960687", "(01544) 668176", "(07540) 940315", "0208 4137611", "(01472) 119737", "(0208) 6494623", 

            "(01156) 145807", "07731 566115", "(0207) 7270589", "(0207) 7542812", "(01205) 835056")

  )

This might be useful as well:

TelephoneData$TelNr <- gsub("\+44", "0", gsub("[() ]", "", TelephoneData$PHONE))   #replace +44 by 0, remove spaces and brackets

TelephoneData$TelNr <- gsub("([0-9]{5})(.*)", "\1 \2", TelephoneData$TelNr) #insert space after every 5 chars

TelephoneData <- TelephoneData[order(TelephoneData$TelNr ),] #sort by the column TelNr

Giving the result

#     FIRST           PHONE        TelNr

#1     STAN +44 1152 195298 01152 195298

#16  JOSHUA  (01156) 145807 01156 145807

#3     JOHN    01160 979447 01160 979447

#20   BRIAN  (01205) 835056 01205 835056

#5   ROBERT    01232 637283 01232 637283

#6    ANGIE    01296 230679 01296 230679

#14    MARY  (01472) 119737 01472 119737

#11     KEN  (01544) 668176 01544 668176

#4     VERA    01597 501161 01597 501161

#18 PHILLIP  (0207) 7270589 02077 270589

#19    KATE  (0207) 7542812 02077 542812

#9   JUDITH  (0208) 0511522 02080 511522

#10  TREVOR +44 208 3960687 02083 960687

#13  GLADYS    0208 4137611 02084 137611

#15    MARY  (0208) 6494623 02086 494623

#7     PAUL  (07183) 151418 07183 151418

#2    FIONA    07366 602865 07366 602865

#12   BRIAN  (07540) 940315 07540 940315

#17   BRIAN    07731 566115 07731 566115

#8   GEORGE  (07995) 376450 07995 376450

Hope this helps!

Assuming your dataframe is called data you can clean up the phone numbers like this:

 library(stringi)

 data$PHONENUM <- stri_replace_all_fixed(data$PHONENUM, '+44', '0') #changes +44 to 0

 data$PHONENUM <- gsub("[^0-9.]", "", data$PHONENUM) # removes all white space and ()

Then you can order the phone numbers like this:

 data[order(data$PHONENUM), ]

Does that do what you need?

EDIT: don't need the lapply at all, those functions will do the whole list anyway