Question

I have a tableView which has cells with phone numbers. The app is not dialing the numbers though. See the code below

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
 if (indexPath.section == 2) {
  UITableViewCell *selectedCell = [tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:indexPath];
  NSString *numberToDial = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"tel:%@", selectedCell.detailTextLabel.text];

  NSLog(@"%@",numberToDial);

  [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:numberToDial]];
 }
}

Console ouput:
2010-03-08 01:32:30.830 AIB[1217:207] tel:[phone]

As you can see, the number goes to the console, but doesn’t get dialled. The weird thing is, if I change the last statement to this:

[[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"tel:171"]];

the phone dials the number 171 without any issue

---

The solution to my particular problem is, as suggested below, to remove the spaces from the phone numbers. I achieved this as follows:

- (void)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView didSelectRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    if (indexPath.section == 2) {
        UITableViewCell *selectedCell = [tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:indexPath];
        NSMutableString *numberToDial = [NSMutableString stringWithFormat:@"tel:%@", selectedCell.detailTextLabel.text];

        [numberToDial replaceOccurrencesOfString:@" " 
                                      withString:@"" 
                                         options:NSLiteralSearch 
                                           range:NSMakeRange(0, [numberToDial length])];

        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:numberToDial]];
    }
}

Answer 1

You will need to sanitize the user input for it to be a valid tel:// URL. Specifically this includes stripping of:

• Spaces
• Hashes (#)
• Asterisks(*)

From iPhone Dev Center:

To prevent users from maliciously
redirecting phone calls or changing
the behavior of a phone or account,
the Phone application supports most,
but not all, of the special characters
in the tel scheme. Specifically, if a
URL contains the * or # characters,
the Phone application does not attempt
to dial the corresponding phone
number.

From URLs for URLs for Telephone Calls RFC:

…spaces MUST NOT be used in phone
numbers in URLs as the space character
cannot be used in URLs without
escaping it.