Gentian Hila wrote:
> I am facing a very interesting challenge:
>
> We have a program which needs to find a person that has a certain
> phone number on our database which has quite a lot of records.
>
> The problem is that the phone numbers we have in database (Informix
> IDS 9.40) are saved as CHAR(20) and are in different formats - whith
> lots of characters like () , - / or even x letters for extensions.
>
> Part of the problem is that a lot of the records were imported from
> another database which had a lot of different formats.
>
> Anyway, the numbers we want to search for are in 10 digit phone
> numbers. How can I parse the phone numbers we got in database
> (CHAR(20)) so we can match them to our 10 digit numbers? Something
> like this
>
> select * from persons where SomeKindOfFunction(phone) = 2486773456
>
> and it would be true if we got something like 248-677-3456 or
> (248)677-3456 x 431 in database. So SomeKindofFunction() would return
> only the first ten numeric part of the phone field in database?
>
> Any idea would be greatly appreciated !!!!
>
> Genti

if you are happy with regular expressions then I'd just install the
regexp blade

Cheer
Paul

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