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 n

Answer 1

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.