Question

Hi I have got a column in my database which is set to Int.

But my data always starts with a 0 so whenever I add a new record, it strips the 0 off and I don’t want it to do that incase the first character has to be a 1 at some point.

How can I overcome this issue?

Is the best way to use VARCHAR any then validate using PHP?

Update

If I enter 02118272 it is saved to the database as 2118272.

Answer 1

I think that you should use varchar type for that field. If you want to convert a variable to integer in php you can simply do this:

$var=preg_replace("/[^\d]/","",$var);

with this you delete all characters that aren’t numbers and then you can put this value into the db preserving the initial 0.