How to look-up a contact's name from their phone number on Android?

Question

I am trying to get the sender\'s name from the contacts database using a content provider.

The problem is I don\'t know how to implement it. Like now I can only pull

Answer 1

Yes, this is possible using ContactsContract.PhoneLookup.CONTENT_FILTER_URI in Android 2.0 and higher and Contacts.Phones.CONTENT_FILTER_URL in Android 1.6 and earlier.

For example usage, see the documentation for ContactsContract.PhoneLookup. Excerpt below:

// Android 1.6 and earlier (backwards compatible for Android 2.0+)
Uri uri = Uri.withAppendedPath(Contacts.Phones.CONTENT_FILTER_URL, Uri.encode(phoneNumber));

// Android 2.0 and later
Uri uri = Uri.withAppendedPath(ContactsContract.PhoneLookup.CONTENT_FILTER_URI, Uri.encode(phoneNumber));

// Query the filter URI
String[] projection = new String[]{ PhoneLookup.DISPLAY_NAME, ...
Cursor cursor = context.getContentResolver().query(uri, projection, ...

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UPDATE: The format of the phone number does not matter. Comparison is robust and highly optimized on Android; it's done using a native sqlite function named PHONE_NUMBERS_EQUAL. For more details, search the codebase for this method. By the way, I'm not certain if it's safe to use that function directly in your own apps, but I wouldn't.