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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-17T20:41:59+00:00

I have a field in my database where users have saved free-form telephone numbers.

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I have a field in my database where users have saved free-form telephone numbers. As a result, the data has all sorts of different formatting:

  • (area) nnn-nnnn
  • area-nnn-nnnn
  • area.nnn.nnnn
  • etc

I would like to strip out all the non-numeric characters and just store the digits, but I can’t find a simple way to do this. Is it possible without using one REPLACE for each char?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You can use REGEXP_REPLACE since Oracle 10:

    SELECT REGEXP_REPLACE('+34 (947) 123 456 ext. 2013', '[^0-9]+', '')
FROM DUAL

    This example returns 349471234562013.

    Alternative syntaxes include:

    • POSIX character classes:

      '[^[:digit:]]+'

    • Perl-influenced extensions (since Oracle 11):

      '\D+'
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