Global Phone Number (E.164)

Detects international telephone numbers in ITU-T E.164 form: a leading "+" (the international prefix symbol defined by ITU-T E.123, the companion notation recommendation) followed by a country code and national significant number totalling no more than 15 digits, per E.164's own numbering-space limit (country code 1-3 digits, subscriber number up to 12 digits, 15 digits maximum overall). This pattern covers only the "+"-prefixed international representation — it is the global counterpart to the country-specific domestic-format patterns (us-phone-number, ca-phone-number, uk-phone-number, in-phone-number, and the EU national patterns), which additionally match each country's bare domestic formatting conventions. Real-world renderings commonly use spaces or hyphens between digit groups even though E.123 formally prescribes spaces only; both are accepted here.

Type: regex
Engine: universal
Confidence: medium
Confidence justification: Medium confidence: the mandatory literal "+" prefix is distinctive and rare outside telecom contexts, but the digits that follow it carry no checksum and the regex cannot validate the country-code/national-number split against a real assignment table, so E.164-shaped values remain a high digit-collision format at heart. Per the phone-family convention set by au-fixed-line-telephone (every tier requires positive corroborative evidence; a +CC prefix alone is insufficient gating), no zero-evidence tier is offered: the 75 tier requires generic phone-context evidence and the 85 tier requires specific international-phone keywords with template/noise exclusion.
Jurisdictions: global
Regulations: GDPR, CCPA/CPRA
Frameworks: ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 2
Data categories: pii, contact-information
Scope: narrow
Risk rating: 5
Platform compatibility: Purview: Compatible, GCP DLP: Unsupported, Macie: Unsupported, Zscaler: Compatible, Palo Alto: Unsupported, Netskope: Unsupported

Pattern

(?<!\d)\+[1-9][\s.-]?\d[\s.-]?\d[\s.-]?\d[\s.-]?\d[\s.-]?\d[\s.-]?\d[\s.-]?\d(?:[\s.-]?\d)?(?:[\s.-]?\d)?(?:[\s.-]?\d)?(?:[\s.-]?\d)?(?:[\s.-]?\d)?(?:[\s.-]?\d)?(?:[\s.-]?\d)?(?!\d)

Corroborative evidence keywords

phone, mobile, cell, call, text, contact number, international phone number, call me at, telephone, tel, dial, text me, text message, [object Object], WhatsApp, voicemail, phone number, mobile number, landline

Proximity: 300 characters

Should match

Contact: +442079460958 — UK Ofcom-reserved London drama number (020 7946 0958, leading 0 dropped per E.164/+44 convention), contiguous digits, no separators
Call +1 2125550147 for support — NANPA-reserved US fictional 555-01XX exchange in +1 international form, one space after the 1-digit country code
Fax: +91 9876543210 — India (+91), illustrative synthetic value — no official DoT/TRAI reserved test-number block exists for India (verified absent during research), so a structurally valid but non-allocated-looking descending-digit sequence is used
International line: +374 10123456 — Armenia (+374), 3-digit country code, illustrative synthetic subscriber number

Should not match

+0123456789 — Leading digit after the + is 0 — E.164 country codes never start with 0
12125550147 — Same NANP digit shape as a should_match case but missing the mandatory + prefix — bare domestic-style digit runs are out of scope for this international-only pattern
+123456 — Only 6 digits after the +, below the practical 8-digit minimum this pattern enforces (ITU specifies only a 15-digit maximum, no minimum)
+123456789012345678 — 18 digits after the +, three more than E.164's 15-digit maximum — no valid sub-length cut satisfies the trailing digit boundary

Known false positives

A syntactically valid "+" followed by 8-15 digits does not confirm the country code is actually assigned or that the subscriber-number length matches that country's real numbering plan — the regex cannot enforce a full per-country-code length table without banned per-alternative length alternation. Mitigation: Layer with corroborative phone-context evidence at the 75/85 tiers; deployers needing precise per-country validation should prefer the relevant country-specific pattern (us-phone-number, uk-phone-number, etc.) where one exists.
Co-fires with any country-specific pattern's international (+CC) sub-regex for the same value (e.g. us-phone-number's Regex_us_phone_intl), since both structurally match a "+"-prefixed digit run. This is expected and by design — the two levels of pattern serve different deployment needs (broad global coverage vs. tight per-country evidence). Mitigation: Deploy either this pattern alone for broad international coverage, or the country-specific patterns alone for tighter per-country evidence, or both if RulePack budget allows and de-duplicate at the reporting layer.