将varchar转换为仅用于搜索查询的int？

Question

What I've been trying to do is to select a row from a table while treating the varchar cells as int ones,

Here's a little explanation: I have a table of phone numbers, some have "-" in them, some don't.

I wanted to select a number from the database, without including those "-" in the query. So I used this preg_replace function:

$number = preg_replace("/[^0-9]/","",$number); //that leaves only the numbers in the variable

and then I run the following query:

"SELECT * FROM `contacts` WHERE `phone` = '{$number}'"

Now, of course it won't match sometimes since the number Im searching may have "-" in the database, so I tried to look for a solution, on solution is just converting the cells into int's, but I'm not interested in doing that,

So after looking around, I found a MySQL function named CAST, used like : CAST(phone AS UNSIGNED)

I tried to mess with it, but it didn't seem to work.

Edit:

I kept looking around for a solution, and eventually used MySQL's REPLACE function for that.

"SELECT * FROM `contacts` WHERE REPLACE(phone,'-','') = '{$number}'"

Thank you all for your help.

Answer 1

1. The easiest way to do it might be by using the REPLACE operator.

SELECT * FROM `contacts` WHERE REPLACE(REPLACE(`phone`, '-', ''), ' ', '') = '5550100';

What it does is simpy replacing all whitespaces and dashes with nothing, namely removing all spaces and dashes.

2. Another alternative to solve the problem would be to use LIKE . If the phone numbers with a dash always are formatted the same way like 555-0100 and 555-0199 you can simple insert a %-sign instead of the dash. If your number may be formatted in different ways you can insert a %-between every character. It's not a beautiful solution but it does the trick.

SELECT * FROM `contacts` WHERE `phone` LIKE '555%0100'; 

or

SELECT * FROM `contacts` WHERE `phone` LIKE '5%5%5%0%1%0%0';

3. You can use regular expressions. Since MySQL doesn't implement regex replace functions you need to use user defined functions. Have a look at https://launchpad.net/mysql-udf-regexp . It supports REGEXP_LIKE, REGEXP_SUBSTR, REGEXP_INSTR and REGEXP_REPLACE.

Edit: Removed my first answer and added some other alternatives.

Answer 2

MySQL doesn't support extraction of regex matches.

You could try writing a stored function to handle it, but your best bet is to convert the data to ints so that all the numbers are uniform . I know you said you don't want to do that, but if you can , then it's the best thing to do . Otherwise, you could do something like:

"SELECT * FROM `contacts` WHERE `phone` = '{$number}' OR `phone` = '{$number_with_dashes}'"

That is, search for the plain number OR the number with dashes.

Answer 3

我一直在寻找解决方案，并最终使用了MySQL的REPLACE函数。

"SELECT * FROM `contacts` WHERE REPLACE(phone,'-','') = '{$number}'"