Is it better to store telephone numbers in some canonical format or “as entered”?

Question

Storing a telehone number in some kind of canonical format has several advantages from a programmers point of view, but it might confuse the user, if sudde

Answer 1

I would keep the original entered mess but would also insert a cleaned up form in the database. Which only kept the numbers less punctuation and spaces. Using the cleaned form would allow easy lookups without worrying about different possible entered styles.