I have a small C# program that, given a phone number, can match on a contact or a lead and optionally pops a browser window. It's nearly extremely good, but the current weaknesses of that code at the moment are:

1) I seem to have to issue two queries - one for contacts, the other for leads as shown here:

2) Worse, I have to send in the exact number the way it is formatted in the d/b. So if I search on 0123456789 but the data was stored 01234 56789 (with a space in the middle of the number), I get "no matches".

So:

a) is there a way to issue one searchRecords request against multiple entities?

b) is there a way of specifying "non-exact match" / "ignore white space" on the query?

Many thanks.