Searching for phone numbers in mysql

Question

I have a table which is full of arbitrarily formatted phone numbers, like this

027 123 5644
021 393-5593
(07) 123 456
042123456

I need to sea

Answer 1

My solution would be something along the lines of what John Dyer said. I'd add a second column (e.g. phoneStripped) that gets stripped on insert and update. Index this column and search on it (after stripping your search term, of course).

You could also add a trigger to automatically update the column, although I've not worked with triggers. But like you said, it's really difficult to write the MySQL code to strip the strings, so it's probably easier to just do it in your client code.

(I know this is late, but I just started looking around here :)