User File Guidelines

If you are uploading a file to compare with our system there are a few guidelines you should follow. The following are important:

Your file will be matched against one or more of the preference service registers using an automated process. The register is complied from full UK area code and telephone number only. If your phone field contains any information other than this a fully correct search may not be possible.

• All files should be in a plain text format , either .csv or .txt.
• No files shall include any database control characters. If any of these characters are imbedded in your file it is unlikely that you will get an accurate result.
• Telephone Extensions should be removed.
• All telephone numbers must be full UK format, including the leading zero.
• International dialing format must not be used.
• Spaces, commas, hyphens, brackets and slashes may be included.
• The only compared characters in a file are 0 (zero) through 9 (nine). All other characters are ignored. Please be very careful with your data as a number such as "0207 456 7945 (ext 22)" will be read as "0207456794522" (notice the 22 has attached itself to the end). This is because all of the other characters are stripped out. 0207 456 7945 may be a listed number but 0207 456 7945 22 will not flag as a match.
• Files must contain one number per line. An example of a file opened in Notepad is shown below.
  

The following list of points are purely for your reference:

• Files must be a maximum of 2 Megabytes. If your file is larger than this you might want to try stripping spaces or hyphens. If you are still having problems then please contact us.
• Phone numbers may contain spaces but each space is 1 byte and therefore by removing spaces in a file with 50,000 numbers and two spaces in each number you could save almost 100 Kb. The email that is returned to you will contain two attachments and will therefore equate to approximately a 200Kb saving.