Help: how to extract digits from a string?

Question

Hi,
I am trying to make a formatted phone number report. The field is VARCHAR2(20). There might be some sort of irregularities. What I need to do are in two steps:
1. extract all digits in order;
2. format the output as (xxx) xxx-xxxx
Any suggestions?
Thank you in advance.
Jimmy

Answer 1

This might be of some use to clean up the phone numbers.
drop   table phone_numbers;
create table phone_numbers
(phone      varchar2(20));
insert into phone_numbers(phone) values ('(111)-555-1212');
insert into phone_numbers(phone) values (' 111 555 1212');
insert into phone_numbers(phone) values ('#555-1212');
insert into phone_numbers(phone) values ('Bob @ 555-1212');
commit;
select phone, translate(phone,'0123456789()-.@#* ','0123456789') edited_phone
from   phone_numbers;
PHONE                EDITED_PHONE
(111)-555-1212       1115551212
111 555 1212        1115551212
#555-1212            5551212
Bob @ 555-1212       Bob5551212You can see by the last example that the search string in the translate function should contain every character you can type on a keyboard.