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Asked: 2026-06-10T16:19:31+00:00

I have two databases, both containing phone numbers. I need to find all instances

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I have two databases, both containing phone numbers. I need to find all instances of duplicate phone numbers, but the formats of database 1 vary wildly from the format of database 2.

I’d like to strip out all non-digit characters and just compare the two 10-digit strings to determine if it’s a duplicate, something like:

SELECT b.phone as barPhone, sp.phone as SPPhone FROM bars b JOIN single_platform_bars sp ON sp.phone.REGEX = b.phone.REGEX

Is such a thing even possible in a mysql query? If so, how do I go about accomplishing this?

EDIT: Looks like it is, in fact, a thing you can do! Hooray! The following query returned exactly what I needed:

SELECT b.phone, b.id, sp.phone, sp.id
FROM bars b JOIN single_platform_bars sp ON REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(b.phone,' ',''),'-',''),'(',''),')',''),'.','') = REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(sp.phone,' ',''),'-',''),'(',''),')',''),'.','')
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    MySQL doesn’t support returning the “match” of a regular expression. The MySQL REGEXP function returns a 1 or 0, depending on whether an expression matched a regular expression test or not.

    You can use the REPLACE function to replace a specific character, and you can nest those. But it would be unwieldy for all “non-digit” characters. If you want to remove spaces, dashes, open and close parens e.g.

    REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(REPLACE(sp.phone,' ',''),'-',''),'(',''),')','')

    One approach is to create user defined function to return just the digits from a string. But if you don’t want to create a user defined function…

    This can be done in native MySQL. This approach is a bit unwieldy, but it is workable for strings of “reasonable” length.

    SELECT CONCAT(IF(SUBSTR(sp.phone,1,1) REGEXP '^[0-9]$',SUBSTR(sp.phone,1,1),'')
             ,IF(SUBSTR(sp.phone,2,1) REGEXP '^[0-9]$',SUBSTR(sp.phone,2,1),'')
             ,IF(SUBSTR(sp.phone,3,1) REGEXP '^[0-9]$',SUBSTR(sp.phone,3,1),'')
             ,IF(SUBSTR(sp.phone,4,1) REGEXP '^[0-9]$',SUBSTR(sp.phone,4,1),'')
             ,IF(SUBSTR(sp.phone,5,1) REGEXP '^[0-9]$',SUBSTR(sp.phone,5,1),'')
       ) AS phone_digits
  FROM sp

    To unpack that a bit… we extract a single character from the first position in the string, check if it’s a digit, if it is a digit, we return the character, otherwise we return an empty string. We repeat this for the second, third, etc. characters in the string. We concatenate all of the returned characters and empty strings back into a single string.

    Obviously, the expression above is checking only the first five characters of the string, you would need to extend this, basically adding a line for each position you want to check…

    And unwieldy expressions like this can be included in a predicate (in a WHERE clause). (I’ve just shown it in the SELECT list for convenience.)

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