iOS 7 contact number spaces are not spaces [duplicate]

Answer 1

I made a small adjustment to the poster's answer in case someone wants to maintain the + at the begining of the number.

I made this small adjustment if you want to keep the plus after removing the spaces.

 Boolean shouldAddPlus = NO;

 if([[phoneNumber substringToIndex:1] isEqualToString:@"+"])
    {
        shouldAddPlus = YES;
    }

 phoneNumber = [[phoneNumber componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:[[NSCharacterSet decimalDigitCharacterSet] invertedSet]] componentsJoinedByString:@""];

 if(shouldAddPlus)
    phoneNumber = [base stringByAppendingString:phoneNumber];

Answer 2

The correct solution is to replace the occurences with a valid space

NSString *clean = [dirty stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"\u00a0" withString:@" "];

So you dont loose the space and the user sees what sees in other apps.

Answer 3

The cleanest solution I'm using in my apps is:

NSMutableCharacterSet *phoneNubmerCharacterSet = [NSMutableCharacterSet characterSetWithCharactersInString:@"+"];
[phoneNubmerCharacterSet formUnionWithCharacterSet:[NSCharacterSet decimalDigitCharacterSet]];
NSString* phoneString = [[phoneString componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:[phoneNubmerCharacterSet invertedSet]] componentsJoinedByString:@""];

No "if" logic, keeps the + in number, removes all kind of random unwanted characters

Answer 4

Some iOS7 phone numbers are encoded with non-breaking space. Try this:

        NSString* stringFormatted = [phoneNumber stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"\u00a0" withString:@""];

Answer 5

I looked at this as not getting rid of 'spaces' but being left with only decimal characters. This code did that for me:

phoneNumberString = [[phoneNumberString componentsSeparatedByCharactersInSet:[[NSCharacterSet decimalDigitCharacterSet] invertedSet]] componentsJoinedByString:@""];

This takes out everything that's not a number 0-9.

Swift 4.1:

phoneNumberString = phoneNumberString.components(separatedBy: CharacterSet.decimalDigits.inverted).joined(separator: "")

Answer 6

After way too much string cleaning I finally found an answer after printing the CFStringRef straight from the Address Book. Here's what's going on behind the scenes...

1. Add a contact in iOS7 and Apple stores this: (555).555-5555 (where . is actually U00A0 or &nbsp)
2. My app copies a contact's info in a CFStringRef from AddressBook (when NSLogged the . shows)
3. CFStringRef is cast into NSString (NSLog now shows 555\U00a0555-5555)

To remove the \U00A0 I tried 3 answers from this thread and [NSCharacterSet characterSetWithRange:(160,1)] which didn't work. What finally worked was this line of code:

phoneNumber = [phoneNumber stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"." withString:@""];

// where @"." was created by typing Option+Spacebar