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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-12T13:37:09+00:00

I have table in the database with a phone number column. The numbers look

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I have table in the database with a phone number column. The numbers look like this:

123456789

I want to format that to look like this:

123-456-789
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    This should do it:

    UPDATE TheTable
SET PhoneNumber = SUBSTRING(PhoneNumber, 1, 3) + '-' + 
                  SUBSTRING(PhoneNumber, 4, 3) + '-' + 
                  SUBSTRING(PhoneNumber, 7, 4)

    Incorporated Kane’s suggestion, you can compute the phone number’s formatting at runtime. One possible approach would be to use scalar functions for this purpose (works in SQL Server):

    CREATE FUNCTION FormatPhoneNumber(@phoneNumber VARCHAR(10))
RETURNS VARCHAR(12)
BEGIN
    RETURN SUBSTRING(@phoneNumber, 1, 3) + '-' + 
           SUBSTRING(@phoneNumber, 4, 3) + '-' + 
           SUBSTRING(@phoneNumber, 7, 4)
END
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