Rhino wrote:

----- Original Message ----- From: "abhishek jain" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <mysql@lists.mysql.com>
Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2005 8:10 AM
Subject: Mysql Finding the country name from country prefix


Hi Friends,
I have a ticky mysql problem.
I need to find the country name from the country prefix so eg. i have a
mysql table with prefix and name as the coumns and with datas like :
Prefix,  Name
1          USA
11        XYZ
44        UK
91        India
92        Pakistan
123      ZXF
and i have a number like 911122334455 and i need t match that to india.
I cannt do that directly by this statement select name from
country_table where prefix='91'; for the simple reason as i do not have
the length or the no. of digits the prefix is beforehand.
Pl. help me out.
Quick help will be appreciated.

You are not explaining your problem very clearly at all, particularly why you think this is a MySQL problem.

It looks to me as if you are trying to parse a phone number and determine from the first few digits what country that phone number represents. You already have a table that gives you the country code for each country and it shows clearly that 91 is the country code for India. As for the length of the country code, surely you can easily calculate that 91 has two digits in it.

If you are saying that you have only a string of digits and need to determine the country in which that phone number originates without any further information, all I can say is good luck. The fact is that people write their phone numbers in many different ways. Here in Canada, if I'm giving my number to someone who lives within my city or region, I'm likely to give them only the last seven digits, e.g. 5551212. If I wanted to give my number to someone farther away in Canada, the US, or the Caribbean, I'd give them 5195551212 since we all share the same country code, 1. If I wanted to give my number to someone in some other foreign country, I'd give them 15195551212. So, right away, you have three different ways to express the phone number all of which are accurate and complete in their own context. If you parsed the first example, you might assume that I am in Brazil, because '55' is the country code for Brazil. (Country codes '5' and '555' are not in use at present.) If you parsed 519-555-1212, you wouldn't find anything because there is no country code '5', '51', or '519' currently in use. If you tried to parse '15195551212', you'd think I was in the US, Canada, or one of the Caribbean countries since '1' is the code for those countries. (There is is no '15' or '151' country code at present.) Therefore, the phone number _by itself_ is next to useless to you unless you are absolutely certain that the phone number is complete and includes the country code, area/city code and local number.

None of that is a MySQL problem. The problem lies in your data acquisition technique. If you have to parse phone numbers, the input forms you use have to ensure that the user supplies the entire phone number; ideally, that number would be supplied in different fields, one of which would be the country code. Then you would have no problem except making sure that the user has supplied their own phone number and not someone elses. (The number I used in my examples, 15195551212, is the directory assistance phone number for my area, not my own phone number.)

So, unless I've misunderstood what you are asking, I don't think we can help you very much. There is no function in MySQL or any other database I have used that can calculate the country code accurately given only a phone number that may or may not be complete.

Rhino

Everything you say is true, if the list contains incomplete phone numbers, but why do you assume that is the case? The OP said no such thing. The question is, given a string such as '911122334455', how do you find rows in the country_table where the prefix column matches the beginning of the string? I think that amounts to, how do I do string comparisons in mysql?

Michael

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