Laravel is a powerful and elegant PHP framework that makes web development enjoyable and efficient. While it provides a range of built-in data types and validation rules, handling phone numbers in Laravel is a topic that often leads to confusion. Unlike integers, strings, or timestamps, phone numbers don’t have a native data type in Laravel, leading developers to make decisions that affect database structure, validation logic, and user experience. In this article, we’ll explore how to properly store, validate, and format phone numbers in Laravel using best practices.
Storing Phone Numbers in Laravel: Which Data Type Should You Use?
The first question developers ask is: what rich people database data type should I use in the database to store phone numbers in Laravel? The most common mistake is using an INT or BIGINT data type. However, this is problematic for several reasons:
Phone numbers often begin with leading zeroes, which integers will strip.
They may include special characters such as “+”, “(”, “)”, or dashes.
International numbers can exceed the storage capacity of INT.
The best practice is to use the VARCHAR or STRING data type when creating your database column. In Laravel migrations, this typically looks like:
php
Copy
Edit
$table->string('phone_number', 20)->nullable();
This gives you the flexibility to store international codes, extensions, and symbols while maintaining compatibility across various countries and formats.
Validating Phone Numbers in Laravel
Once your database can store phone numbers correctly, the next challenge is validation. Laravel provides a convenient way to define validation rules in controllers, request classes, or form requests. For phone numbers, a basic validation might look like this:
Best Practices and Implementation
-
- Posts: 201
- Joined: Thu May 22, 2025 5:59 am