Localized phone number formatting

Question

I've looked into NSFormatter, NSNumberFormatter, and the other formatting classes, but can't find a build into solution. I need to format phone numbers depending on the country code.

For instance, for US, I get a string such as [phone] which I need to format to look like [phone]. The problem is I need to do this for all formats. Netherlands, I receive a string [phone] which will be [phone] (something like that).

Hardcoding for 200+ countries is too tedious and I really don't know all the format rules. Is there something in the docs I'm overlooking or does anyone know of an open source class that manages this?

Answer 1

You can try this:

    let phoneNumber : CNPhoneNumber
    let digits = phoneNumber.performSelector("digits").takeRetainedValue() as! String

It gives you directly the string, without formatting, with the phone number. However if the number is saved with international prefix, you will have it also in the resulted string.

Answer 2

Unfortunately iOS does not have any public APIs for this. You can try to integrate libphonenumber that is a complete implementation for parsing and formatting international phone numbers. It has a C++ version so theoretically you can cross-link with it.

Answer 3

You definitely don't want to hard-code all of the various country formats. There are typically 3-5 formats per country. Instead, use a format database (such as a plist) and write code to format the number based on the given country code.

A good international format property list 'UIPhoneFormats.plist' can be found here: https://code.google.com/p/iphone-patch/source/browse/trunk/bgfix/UIKit.framework/PhoneFormats/UIPhoneFormats.plist?r=7

In that list, '$' allows any character, '#' must be a number, and the '(space) ', '(', ')' and '-' are inserted between numbers. Non-numeric characters typed by the user hint to the desired format.

I've shared my phone number formatter class, inspired by Ahmed Abdelkader's work, at https://github.com/lathamglobal/iOS-Phone-Number-Formatter . It is a very small, single-class international phone number formatter that uses the plist just mentioned.

Answer 4

Try this Google solution - https://github.com/me2day/libPhoneNumber-iOS They have ports for C++, Java, Objective-C and others.

Answer 5

See https://github.com/rmaddy/RMPhoneFormat for an iOS specific solution.