How to get a Phone Number from an Address Book Contact (iphone sdk)

Question

I am showing an addressbook view to the user and letting them click on a contact and select a phone number. If they select a phone number, I want to get the phone number as an integer and the contact's name as an NSString.

I've tried doing it with the following code:

    //printf("%s\n",[[(NSArray *)ABMultiValueCopyArrayOfAllValues(theProperty) objectAtIndex:identifier] UTF8String]);

    //CFArrayRef *arrayString = [[(NSArray *)ABMultiValueCopyArrayOfAllValues(theProperty) objectAtIndex:identifier] UTF8String];
    NSArray *arrayString = [(NSArray *)ABMultiValueCopyArrayOfAllValues(theProperty) objectAtIndex:identifier];
    printf("%s\n", arrayString);

This code is inside this method:

- (BOOL)peoplePickerNavigationController:(ABPeoplePickerNavigationController *)peoplePicker shouldContinueAfterSelectingPerson:(ABRecordRef)person property:(ABPropertyID)property identifier:(ABMultiValueIdentifier)identifier

And I am checking if the user selected a phone number with this code:

if (propertyType == kABStringPropertyType)   
{
    [self wrongSelection];

} 
else if (propertyType == kABIntegerPropertyType)     
{
    [self wrongSelection];

} 
else if (propertyType == kABRealPropertyType)    
{
    [self wrongSelection];
} 
else if (propertyType == kABMultiStringPropertyType)     
{
     //This is the phone number...

I am able to get the phone number to display in the console with printf, however I can't figure out how to convert it into an integer and how to also get the contacts name even though the property selected is not a person's name.

Also, what I'm doing seems very inefficient. Are there any better ways to do this?

Edit: If I can't store them as an int, a string would be fine. I just can't figure out how to go from that array to an actual string. If I cast it or save it as a UTF8String I always get some error.

Answer 1

To get the property efficiently (as far as reading goes), you can do something like this in your callback method:

switch( propertyType ) {
  case kABMultiStringPropertyType:
    // this is the phone number, do something
    break;
  default:
    [self wrongSelection];
    break;
}

I'm not sure you actually even need to parse that, though. To get the phone number from the record you could do (again, inside your callback method):

ABMultiValueRef phoneNumberProperty = ABRecordCopyValue(person, kABPersonPhoneProperty);
NSArray* phoneNumbers = (NSArray*)ABMultiValueCopyArrayOfAllValues(phoneNumberProperty);
CFRelease(phoneNUmberProperty);

// Do whatever you want with the phone numbers
NSLog(@"Phone numbers = %@", phoneNumbers);
[phoneNumbers release];

Answer 2

You can't convert the phone number into an integer. Phone numbers are strings. The default entry Apple includes for itself has the number "1-800-MYAPPLE".

Also, even if all components of a phone number are digits, there is no guarantee that phone numbers in all parts of the world are actually small enough to fit inside a 64 bit value, once you factor in area codes, country codes, internal extensions, etc. Users are free to put as much as they want in there.

Answer 3

不使用整数的另一个原因 - 一些国家在电话号码上使用前导零，例如所有英国号码都以零开头（通常写成01234 567890或0123 4567890）！

Answer 4

CFStringRef cfName = ABRecordCopyCompositeName(person);
NSString *personName = [NSString stringWithString:(NSString *)cfName];
CFRelease(cfName);

ABMultiValueRef container = ABRecordCopyValue(person, property);
CFStringRef contactData = ABMultiValueCopyValueAtIndex(container, identifier);
CFRelease(container);
NSString *contactString = [NSString stringWithString:(NSString *)contactData];
CFRelease(contactData);

contactString contains the phone number selected, and personName contains the person's name. As stated above, you can't necessarily convert the string to numbers generically, as it may contain alphabetic characters. However, you could write your own handler to convert alphabetic characters to numbers and strip out everything else to get a numeric string only, which you could then convert to a long (phone numbers get pretty long) .

I question the need to convert a phone number to a numeric value, though, since it may also contain other necessary characters like Pause. Also, a phone number represents a string of digits more than it represents one long number anyway, so the conceptual data format is more String than Int in any case.

Answer 5

Please be aware, that this code crashes in "stringWithString", if the Adressbook-Entry does not contain a name or a contacdata. cfName might be nil!

CFStringRef cfName = ABRecordCopyCompositeName(person);
NSString *personName = [NSString stringWithString:(NSString *)cfName];
CFRelease(cfName); 

fix:

NSString *personName = nil;
if ((cfName = ABRecordCopyCompositeName(person)) != nil) {
     personName = [NSString stringWithString:(NSString *)cfName];
     CFRelease(cfName); 
}