Easy iPhone telephone links in Rails

Some sites, when viewed through an iPhone, have clickable phone numbers, which can be dialed immediately.

Some sites, on the other hand, require the user to copy the phone number and paste it into the dialer manually.

Which ones do you think get more phone calls?

The secret to the clickable phone numbers lies in RFC 3966, which defines the tel: link format. Here's a quick helper that makes tel: links a breeze.

module ApplicationHelper
  def phone_number_link(text)
    sets_of_numbers = text.scan(/[0-9]+/)
    number = "+1-#{sets_of_numbers.join('-')}"
    link_to text, "tel:#{number}"
  end
end

Toss that in your app, and you can effortlessly make any phone number into a link. The helper pulls out the numbers and pushes them back together in the standard "+1-xxx-xxx-xxxx" format. …which means you can use it with a variety of strings:

I'd love to hear about your project.   Give me a call at
= phone_number_link("(626) 841-0708,")
and we can discuss your needs.

Cheers!

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This post was written over 50 years ago, which makes it almost certainly out of date.