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Re: Problem finding telephonenumber in a plain numeric search when number is stored with special characters



--On Sunday, August 28, 2005 10:35 PM +0200 Michael StrÃder <michael@stroeder.com> wrote:

Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:

For Stanford, phone numbers are our second largest nightmare 

;-)

people get to
enter their phone numbers into a web application, and you get very
interesting things like "N-ONE". :P


Well, if they really use one web application you can make your life
easier by immediately checking the input format there.

Unfortunately, it isn't that simple. Stanford is its own tel-co, which means we support all sorts of interesting things, like 5 digit numbers (first number is your stanford local prefix) and text numbers (5-HELP). So nearly anything is valid. The "none" was more accurately "5-NONE" or something like that, which is perfectly valid under our scheme, but not the persons real number. ;)

We do have a routine that strips out characters illegal under the telephoneNumber syntax, and rejects a few other things, but we are quite limited in what we can do.

--Quanah


--
Quanah Gibson-Mount
Principal Software Developer
ITSS/Shared Services
Stanford University
GnuPG Public Key: http://www.stanford.edu/~quanah/pgp.html

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