It can be very useful to define reusable utility functions that you might want to invoke from several places in your message definition file. For instance, you might want to create a script for making a cleanly formatted phone number in the format (NNN)NNN-NNNN or NNN-NNNN from a freely formatted phone number field.

Here is an example of a function that you would define in the Global Inbound Script:

def get_clean_phone(OrigNumber):
   Number = strip_non_numeric_chars(OrigNumber)
   if len(Number) == 10:
      Number = '(' + Number[0:3] + ')' + Number[3:6] + '-' + Number[6:10]
   elif len(Number) == 7:
      Number = Number[0:3] + '-' + Number[3:7]
   return Number

This function can be invoked from any Python script in the message definition file:

value = get_clean_phone(value)