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 usually like to store the number stripped and then format for display. Since I don't usually build application for use worldwide, I don't generally have to worry about the format. But in the case of an application for use all around the world, I would probably build a formatting module that formats according to the phone number's locale.