I revived an old .ASP function in C# to pass a clean phone number to the DL and happened upon String().StartsWith, a superior method to Substring(0,Some_Int):

Lame

if (phonenum.Substring(0,2) == "1-" || phonenum.Substring(0,2) == "1." || phonenum.Substring(0,2) == "1 " || phonenum.Substring(0,2) == "1(")

Better

if (phonenum.StartsWith("1-") || phonenum.StartsWith("1.") || phonenum.StartsWith("1 ") || phonenum.StartsWith("1("))

Best

Some regex expression... :-)