Re: Problem finding telephonenumber in a plain numeric search when number is stored with special characters

[Michael Ströder <michael@stroeder.com>]

Pierangelo Masarati wrote:
> Hallvard B Furuseth wrote:
> 
>> I think an approx matching rule would be better, that can match any
>> way we want it to without breaking the standard.
>>  
> What about matching numbers with or without the international code,
> including those cases where the number without international code must
> be prefixed with "0"?  e.g. "+49 (123) 45678" should match "4912345678"
> __and__ "012345678".  We had this pattern in Italy for some time; now
> fortunately the leading "0" must be always present, even with the
> international code.  I think many other countries still have the intl.
> code/leading 0 game, and I'm pretty sure those that allow fancy chars in
> telephone numbers also pretend these two numbers to be treated as synonyms.

IMHO that's not feasible. I remember Spain to have another prefix schema
for wide area calls (9?).

I once wrote a phone number sanitizer function in Python which tries to
normalize all presentation forms commonly used here in Germany (also
prefix 0). It got pretty messy though and it's not applicable to what I
see for e.g. US phone number.

Ciao, Michael.