Ah, something close to my heart - one of the first serious programs I wrote in Perl was a script that generates a 'contacts page' from a MySQL database pauses briefly to reminisce over carefree days of coding.

Varchar is definitely the way to go - you don't need to do any arithmetic, (as has been pointed out) leading zeros are not cut and what you are entering isn't really a number, it is a string of digitsNote: I'm sure that made sense the first time round.

Remember to make your field nice and big for when they decide to change number yet again etc...

Elgon

UPDATE: I knew I forgot something - If you want to give international phone numbers, ie. something like +44 (0) 1234 765 4321, with spaces and brackets varchar is obviously the way to go because it allows this kind of encoding and also allows numbers of different formats.

Update on UPDATE I just noticed that lzcd already posted this reason, oh well, goodbye originality!

In reply to Re: Question about phone number storage. by Elgon
in thread Question about phone number storage. by rfb

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