How to get contacts detail of iphone and make CSV file of that contact

Question

I want to get contact details in an iPhone with information like First Name, Last Name, Phone Number, Phone Number Type, Email Address, Email Address Type etc..

Can

Answer 1

First you will need to use the address book framework so this must be added to your Xcode project.

Next you will need to break the task down into a couple steps.

1) Get the people inside the address book

2) Create your .csv file. I'm assuming you know something about CSV file formatting using characters to separate fields and when to add return characters so you have a properly formatted file. This is probably left for another question thread if you need help with this.

3) Save your .csv file somewhere

1) To get an array of all people in the address book you would do something like the following. The reference documentation for ABAddressBook is here. It should be very helpful in helping you access the data.

ABAddressBook *sharedBook = [ABAddressBook sharedAddressBook];
NSArray *peopleList = [sharedBook people];

2) You will have to iterate through each of the people and build your overall csv data. Usually you would manually create the csv data in an NSString and then convert it to NSData and save the NSData to a file. This is not ideal if you are dealing with a really large set of data. If this is the case then you would probably want some code to write your csv data to the file in chunks so you can free memory as you go. For simplicity sake my code just shows you creating the full file then saving the whole works.

NSString *csvString = @"";
for(ABPerson *aPerson in peopleList) {
  //Do something here to write each property you want to the CSV file.
  csvString = [csvString stringByAppendingFormat:@"'%@'," 
                                    [aPerson valueForProperty:kABFirstNameProperty]];
}

NSData *csvData = [csvString dataUsingEncoding:NSUTF8StringEncoding];

3) Write you file to somewhere

//This is an example of writing your csv data to a file that will be saved in the application's sand box directory. 
//This file could be extracted using iTunes file sharing.

//Get the proper path to save the file
NSArray *paths = NSSearchPathForDirectoriesInDomains(NSDocumentDirectory, NSUserDomainMask, YES);
NSString *documentsDirectory = [paths objectAtIndex:0];
NSString *writablePath = [documentsDirectory stringByAppendingPathComponent:@"my_file.csv"];

 //Actually write the data
 BOOL isSuccessful = [csvData writeToFile:fullPath atomically:NO];
 if(isSuccessful) {
     //Do something if the file was written
  } else {
    //Do something if there was an error writing the file
  }