(keitai-l) Japanese phone numbers

Hi all--

I'm Lauren from Google, and I've been working on Google iMode.  A while
back, Cyrus posted a note from me, and ever since then I've been an avid
reader.  (A sincere thank you to all of you who tried out the demo of our 
iMode search engine and its HTML->cHTML proxy.  It is now running on our
main site.  You should just be able to point your phone at www.google.com,
and we'll take you straight to our iMode engine.) 

So, I have lots of questions about iMode, but at the moment, the most
pressing one is in regards to Japanese phone numbers.  I'm trying to
modify our iMode proxy to detect Japanese phone numbers in text and 
rewrite them as anchors with the prefix "tel:".  We do this in our
HTML->WML proxy for U.S.-style phone numbers.  The trouble is that it's
unclear to me exactly what format Japanese phone numbers have.  I've heard
a variety of things, the scariest of which is that Japanese phone numbers
typically have three parts--each of which could vary in length.    

Could someone tell me a little bit more about the format of Japanese phone
numbers?  Does each section vary over a fixed range?  If the first section
is x-characters long, is the second section y-x characters long?  Should I
be prepending a fixed number code to the beginning of certain
numbers?  (For example, if our WML proxy sees the number 650-330-0100, it
would prepend a 1.)  How do cell phone numbers look?  Should I expect
dashes, dots, parens between sections?

I apologize for my naivete.  I would love a pointer to a website
(or just the right set of query terms for a search engine!) explaining
all this.

Thank you!

Sincerely,
Lauren

Software Engineer
Google, Inc.








[ Did you check the archives?   http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]