使用正则表达式在数据库中搜索电话号码

Question

I need to search in a database for a phonenumber.
However, I don't know how the phone number is stored in the database, this can be in different ways, like:

  0123456789 
  012 3456789 
  012 34 56 78 9 
  012-3456789

The string that I have to look for is always formatted like

 0123456789

My query now looks like:

SELECT * FROM account WHERE phonenumber = '0123456789'

But this ofcourse only works when the phonenumber is formatted like the search string.
How do I use a regex of other function to search for all kind of formatted phonenumbers?

Answer 1

While it is possible to perform REGEXP's in MySql, I don't think its a very solid solution and the expression will be hard to tune.

SELECT * FROM account WHERE phonenumber REGEXP '^([0-9]{1}( |-|)){9}[0-9]{1}$'

A good tool to test expressions is this site: http://www.spaweditor.com/scripts/regex/index.php

The trick is to normalize your data before you enter in in your database which means strip the telephone number of all non numeric characters.

You'll need to fix the numbers already in the table too.

Best way is to store the data normalized, i.e.: Country + area + number separately .