NSNumberFormatter to format US Telephone Numbers

Question

I\'m trying to convert a string of numbers, entered by the user, into a sexy string like Phone.app on the iPhone. Here is the code I\'m using, which doesn\'t work (no specia

Answer 1

I think your issue is that NSNumberFormatter does not support brackets, spaces or dashes. I tried to implement the same method as you and it failed silently and just output unformatted text.

The general problem here is that the iPhone SDK doesn't provide a method to format phone numbers in a locale dependent way.

I have raised bugs with Apple for the following (two of these were duplicates of known issues so I've included Apple's original bug # for those):

#6933244 - Need iPhone SDK interface to format text as locale dependent phone number
#5847381 - UIControl does not support a setFormatter method
#6024985 - Overridden UITextField drawTextInRect method is never called

In an ideal world Apple would provide an NSPhoneNumberFormatter, and you would call setFormatter on your UIControl so it displayed text in a nice pretty way. Unfortunately that doesn't exist on the iPhone.