How to format a numeric column as phone number in SQL

Question

I have table in the database with a phone number column. The numbers look like this:

123456789

I want to format that to look like this:

Answer 1

I'd generally recommend you leave the formatting up to your front-end code and just return the data as-is from SQL. However, to do it in SQL, I'd recommend you create a user-defined function to format it. Something like this:

CREATE FUNCTION [dbo].[fnFormatPhoneNumber](@PhoneNo VARCHAR(20))
RETURNS VARCHAR(25)
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @Formatted VARCHAR(25)

IF (LEN(@PhoneNo) <> 10)
    SET @Formatted = @PhoneNo
ELSE
    SET @Formatted = LEFT(@PhoneNo, 3) + '-' + SUBSTRING(@PhoneNo, 4, 3) + '-' + SUBSTRING(@PhoneNo, 7, 4)

RETURN @Formatted
END
GO

Which you can then use like this:

SELECT [dbo].[fnFormatPhoneNumber](PhoneNumber) AS PhoneNumber
FROM SomeTable

It has a safeguard in, in case the phone number stored isn't the expected number of digits long, is blank, null etc - it won't error.

EDIT: Just clocked on you want to update your existing data. The main bit that's relevant from my answer then is that you need to protect against "dodgy"/incomplete data (i.e. what if some existing values are only 5 characters long)