Phone number format

[Anon]

Hello all,
I have a question concerning about phone number format. I use MySQL for PHP. When user put their phone number to the form, someone use 1234567890, but someone use 123-456-7890. How can I figure it out? And when I make database, what format I should use?
Please tell me. Thanks.

[brandonschnell]

i use a simple regular expression to strip out everything but the digits and save just that to the database. use php to format the data after pulling it from the database.

$phone_number = ereg_replace ("[^0-9]","", $phone_number)

also you might want to require users to specify a minimum of 10 digits for the phone numbers.

[Anon]

On database standing just use varchar(12) type

[brandonschnell]

yes, in theory that would be nice. the problem is that many people have phone numbers longer than 12 digits. You could work around that by having a field for a phone number extension, but it won't allow for all phone numbers such as international users.

using a varchar that short wouldn't save any real disk space and can slow down the database. Might as well use type char(20) so that it has enough room for the vast majority of phone numbers and gain the speed advantage with using a fixed row size in the database (if thats how the database is arranged).

[Anon]

Ok if you like then use char(20), but read the mysql manual, then you see that varchar(20) is better - it uses less memory