Phone number formatting an EditText in Android

Question

I am making a simple Address Book app (targeting 4.2) that takes name, address, city, state, zip and phone.

I want to format the phone number input as a phone number (XXX) XXX-XXXX, but I need to pull the value out as a string so I can store it in my database when I save. How can i do this?? I have the EditText set for "phone number" input but that obviously doesn't do too much.

Answer 1

Simply use the PhoneNumberFormattingTextWatcher, just call:

editText.addTextChangedListener(new PhoneNumberFormattingTextWatcher()); 

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Addition
To be clear, PhoneNumberFormattingTextWatcher's backbone is the PhoneNumberUtils class. The difference is the TextWatcher maintains the EditText while you must call PhoneNumberUtils.formatNumber() every time you change its contents.

Answer 2

There is a library called PhoneNumberUtils that can help you to cope with phone number conversions and comparisons. For instance, use ...

EditText text = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.editTextId); PhoneNumberUtils.formatNumber(text.getText().toString()) 

... to format your number in a standard format.

PhoneNumberUtils.compare(String a, String b); 

... helps with fuzzy comparisons. There are lots more. Check out http://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/PhoneNumberUtils.html for more.

p.s. setting the the EditText to phone is already a good choice; eventually it might be helpful to add digits e.g. in your layout it looks as ...

<EditText     android:id="@+id/editTextId"     android:inputType="phone"     android:digits="0123456789+"  />