>Hello,
>I am currently working on cleansing some horrific data. I need to store phone numbers (US and international). I usually use a 10 char field and strip out all special characters on the application side for US phone numbers. I've never worked with international phone numbers before. What's a good standard way of storing them?
>
>Thanks!

Which part is horrific? Having special characters in phone number field? IMHO a phone number field should be flexible and allow special characters. I hate database admins that thinks they should control how I store a phone number. I may write it something like:

1-800-VERIZON
or
1-800-8374966

why would I want to be forced to:
18008374966

My current work phone number is:

+90 (232) 278 55 65 (Ext:156)

As a human I can memorize this number at a glance and would hate it to be:

902322785565156

or anything in between parsing this whole thing into multiple unnecessary boxes. It is not so hard to write regular expression for these if you feel you need to validate anyway.

My 0.2 cents.
Cetin