validate international phone numbers

Hi, I am trying to validate international phone numbers before adding into a db. After a bit of research I came up with this regex: return (ereg('^[0-9]{1,3}\.[0-9]{1,6}\.[0-9]{1,8}$', $phone)); However, this tightens the numbers to something like this: 409.711.933838 Thats a problem, since some countries have complete other formats and some peopole place a + in front and a : instead of . or even just the number. Can anybody recommend a good regex to validate this? I am not to good at creating regex :-( Thanx for any help, Merlin