I once had to deal with a DB (of my own creation, gone wild) that had three fields for the three parts of the NANP number. We wound up stuffing international into it by making the first field a varchar that allowed up to 8 or 9 digits, making the second field NULL allowed and making the last field a varchar that could hold up to 15 digits. Thus international numbers had a huge areacode and a huge local number and could be distinguished from NANP numbers by having a null NXX.

I am still worried about buring in hell over that one. Of course we were able to get away with minor perl changes and didn't have to change one script at all. Still, I'm pretty sure I owe a few coders beer just for not complaining louder in the meeting when they decided to do it.

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)