Comparing phone numbers in Android

Question

I need to compare two phone numbers to determine if they're from the same sender/receiver. The user may send a message to a contact, and that contact may reply.

The reply usually comes in +[country-code][area-code-if-any][and-then-the-actual-number] format. For example, +94 71 2593276 for a Sri Lankan phone number.

And when the user sends a message, he will usually enter in the format (for the above example) 0712593276 (assume he's also in Sri Lanka).

So what I need is, I need to check if these two numbers are the same. This app will be used internationally. So I can't just replace the first 2 digits with a 0 (then it will be a problem for countries like the US). Is there any way to do this in Java or Android-specifically?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Android has nice PhoneNumberUtils, and i guess your looking for :

    public static boolean compare (String a, String b)

look in : http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/PhoneNumberUtils.html

using it should look like this :

String phone1   
String phone2 

 if (PhoneNumberUtils.compare(phone1, phone2)) {
    //they are the same do whatever you want!
   }

Answer 2

android.telephony.PhoneNumberUtils class provides almost all necessary functions to deal with phone numbers and standards.

For your case, the solution is PhoneNumberUtils.compare(Context context, String number1, String number2) or else PhoneNumberUtils.compare(String number1, String number2).The former one checks a resource to determine whether to use a strict or loose comparison algorithm, thus the better choice in most cases.

PhoneNumberUtils.compare("0712593276", "+94712593276") // always true
PhoneNumberUtils.compare("0712593276", "+44712593276") // always true

// true or false depends on the context
PhoneNumberUtils.compare(context, "0712593276", "+94712593276") 

Take a look at the official documentation. And the source code.