Question

In a similar vein to Sending Pause and DTMF input in android, I’m trying to send the pause character “,” to the dialer. This works on HTC Sense phones and even on the Xoom, but not on “stock experience” phones like the Nexus One or T-Mobile G2 (and I suspect the Motorola Droid).

These phones seem to have a dialer that tries to pretty-format the number (ie adding dashes) and stop upon hitting a comma character. Interestingly, it doesn’t choke on a “p” character, though it will strip out “p”s and keep adding numbers.

Here is what the ActivityManager sees:

I/ActivityManager(   92): Starting activity: Intent { act=android.intent.action.DIAL dat=tel:[phone],444 cmp=com.android.contacts/.DialtactsActivity }

I’ve also tried the encoded form, “tel:[phone]%2C444” with no difference in behavior on these phones. I’ve tried “p”, as mentioned, but these characters are dropped resulting in the dialers having 888-333-3444 incorrectly populated, and I’m not sure that “p” is correct anyway.

So, the question: Is there a way to specify a pause that works across most or all android dialers?

Answer 1

Short answer: Doesn’t look like it’s possible using the native dialer.

Long answer:

The native dialer in Android uses the following code to extract the number you pass in to the dialer using an Intent

if ("tel".equals(uri.getScheme())) {
  // Put the requested number into the input area
  String data = uri.getSchemeSpecificPart();
  setFormattedDigits(data, null);
  return true;
} 

Within the setFormattedDigits method the number gets transformed thusly:

  String dialString = PhoneNumberUtils.extractNetworkPortion(data);

Looking at the docs for extractNetworkPortion you’ll notice that it, “Extracts the network address portion [where the] Network address portion is everything up to DTMF control digit separators (pause or wait).

So the code is intentionally striping out the pause character and anything that comes after it. The only alternative I can think of is to replace the dialer or use the ACTION_CALL action instead of ACTION_DIAL. That’ll bypass the dialer, so it should be used with caution.