phone number, get rid off all the non-numeric characters?

[searain]

Say, in the phone number, people may input too many formats. such as 555-555-5555 or [phone] etc.

What I want to do is that get rid off all the non numeric values and make all the phone number just like a string of numbers

so above two will be transferred to 5555555555. so i can search the phone number use 555555555, and find it whatever the user put in.

Could anyone give me a function to do that "get rid off all the non numeric values and make all the phone number just like a string of numbers"?

Thanks!

[poison]

$phone='555-555-5555';
$phone=preg_replace('/[^0-9]/', '', $phone);
echo $phone;

have fun

[laserlight]

I think this might work:

$phone_num = preg_replace('/\D/', '', $phone_num);

Where \D means "any character that is not a decimal digit"

[sidney]

 $num="5/5(5*5)5-55.5+-5";
$newnum="";
for($i=0;$i<strlen($num);$i++)
	{
	if(is_numeric($num{$i}))
		{
		$newnum.=$num{$i};
		}
	}
echo $newnum;

[searain]

Hi, thanks. Is there a same function in the SQL, so I can use $phone_num = preg_replace('/\D/', '', $phone_num) to transfer the search string to the right format. But I also need a SQL function to transfer the phone number in the database to the same format to do a "like" match search.

Thanks!

[laserlight]

You could take a look at:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/String_comparison_functions.html
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/Regexp.html