PHP SQL - Compare phone numbers ?

Author

Compare phone numbers ?

Damien

2005-09-01, 7:56 am

Hi to all,
I'm trying to compare a phone number (entered in a form field) with
another from a database (MySQL). Problem is, neither are formatted: the
French style may use dots, slashes, spaces, hyphens to separate the
digit groups.
eg: the user could enter +33 3 87 00 00 00 and want to see records like
: +33387000000 or +33/3/00/00/00.

How can I compare only the digits and return matching rows ? Is it
possible in a single MySQL query ?

Thanks a lot in advance !
BR,
Damien
--
"So you're just taking your caffeine level past the medical definition
of 'stimulant' into the 'poisons' category?"
Bastard Operator From Hell

ZeldorBlat

2005-09-01, 6:57 pm

I would normalize all your data when you put it into the database. The
easiest way would be to remove any character that is not a digit before
inserting. Then the comparison is easy! You can still format the
number to show it on the page, but I wouldn't do this until you're
ready to display it.

Hilarion

2005-09-01, 6:57 pm

ZeldorBlat <zeldorblat@gmail.com> wrote:
>I would normalize all your data when you put it into the database. The
> easiest way would be to remove any character that is not a digit before
> inserting. Then the comparison is easy! You can still format the
> number to show it on the page, but I wouldn't do this until you're
> ready to display it.

One can also use both data - store the data as user entered it,
and also (in separate field) normalized data (the field could
be filled with a trigger). This way you can check (and display)
the data the way it was entered, use normalized version for searching
and for normalized or specificaly formatted output.

Hilarion

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