I have a table with a phone
column, where data may have spaces, dots,dashes or + signs between the numbers.
I need to do a search with LIKE wildcards that ignore all those characters, for example:
- a record may have phone as "+123-456 78.90"
- a query looking for "6789" or any complete or incomplete sequence of proper digits in order should bring up that record.
Unfortunately I cant cleanup the original table to remove the non-digit characters and do a plain SELECT LIKE %...%.
MYSQL has functions to substitute/remove characters from strings, but can't find a way to use them inside a query with a widlcarded LIKE.
Any help will be much appreciated.