:( Think im going to have to use Regular Expressions :(

[eluser]jedd[/eluser]
Depending on how much you intend to mung the provided parts codes, I'd possibly look at running a second column for parts IDs, calling it 'munged_part_code' or some such, as populating it as data comes in.

Said munging would be using an algorithm such as you described - removing hyphens, underscores, spaces. I'd only do this so that my users, if they were encouraged to do the same mental munging when searching for part numbers, would be more likely to get a result, and get one faster. It's dubious how much time this would save, though I reckon it would be low-cost to implement it.

Alternatively and/or additionally I'd do this on the search side - anything with a space in it would just become either a string of LIKE queries, or an array of strings (identified as being separated by spaces of course) that were LIKE'd to %$string1%$string2%string3%.