I am doing a standard company info database, with phone numbers, and I
was wondering if there was a general concensus about the best way to
store phone numbers. My problem is multiple users will be entering in
data via a web browser (PHP backend), and the formatting may not be
the same in all cases. I'm not sure if I should store some sort of
standard formatting in a plain text field (e.g., "(555) 555-5555") or
strip out all the punctuation characters. There is also the option of
storing the parts in different columns, but that seems a bit overkill
(but would make searching possibly faster).
