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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-11T19:13:25+00:00

I’m trying to convert a string of numbers, entered by the user, into a

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I’m trying to convert a string of numbers, entered by the user, into a sexy string like Phone.app on the iPhone. Here is the code I’m using, which doesn’t work (no special format comes out) and after a certain number of digits it just starts adding “0” to the end of the string.

NSNumberFormatter *formatter = [[NSNumberFormatter alloc] init];
[formatter setNumberStyle:NSNumberFormatterNoStyle];
[formatter setPositiveFormat:@"+# (###) ###-###"];
[formatter setLenient:YES];
NSString *strDigits = [self stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfRegex:@"[^0-9+]" withString:@""];
return [formatter stringFromNumber:[NSNumber numberWithDouble:[strDigits doubleValue]]];
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I think your issue is that NSNumberFormatter does not support brackets, spaces or dashes. I tried to implement the same method as you and it failed silently and just output unformatted text.

    The general problem here is that the iPhone SDK doesn’t provide a method to format phone numbers in a locale dependent way.

    I have raised bugs with Apple for the following (two of these were duplicates of known issues so I’ve included Apple’s original bug # for those):

    #6933244 - Need iPhone SDK interface to format text as locale dependent phone number
#5847381 - UIControl does not support a setFormatter method
#6024985 - Overridden UITextField drawTextInRect method is never called

    In an ideal world Apple would provide an NSPhoneNumberFormatter, and you would call setFormatter on your UIControl so it displayed text in a nice pretty way. Unfortunately that doesn’t exist on the iPhone.

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