Searching for numbers

alexboyer

Hello everyone,

I have a search page I'm working on and everything works correctly. Here is the query string I'm sending to MySQL:

SELECT * FROM $table WHERE $searchfor like '%$searchresult%'

One of the $searchfor criteria is phone number. Is there any way to make it so 949 555 1212 detects 949 555-1212? For some reason, numbers entered with the "-" can't be found when typing in the number without the dash...

Any ideas would be great!

Thanks,

devinemke

how are the phone numbers stored in the db, with or without the dashes? if they are without (which they should be) just strip the dashes out of the search term before feeding it to your query:

$searchresult = str_replace('-', '', $searchresult);

alexboyer

DOH

Thanks.. hehe.

alexboyer

Ok, actually the phone numbers were allowed to be entered without formatting ( my bad ), but I'm going to make a function real fast that batch processes all the phone numbers with that str_replace thing you mentioned. That'll fix them.

Thanks again!

devinemke

Originally posted by alexboyer
Ok, actually the phone numbers were allowed to be entered without formatting ( my bad )...

well, actually, i meant the other way around. you should store phone numbers without any formatting (xxxxxxxxxx instead of xxx-xxx-xxxx). why store all those extra dashes in your data? you can always reformat on display.

alexboyer

I figured I'd change the input method to the following (with [ ] designating text fields):

([xxx]) [xxx]-[xxxx]

([xxx]) = $area
[xxx]=$pref
[xxxx]=$suff

$phone=$area.$pref.$suff;

The above is purely conceptual, not literal.

Then I could just substr the concatenated number on output when I need to format it.

I think this concept should work.

p.s. Thanks for the str_replace method. I was able to clear out the special characters from the entire dbase using that. 🙂