How to look-up a contact's name from their phone number on Android?

Question

I am trying to get the sender's name from the contacts database using a content provider.

The problem is I don't know how to implement it. Like now I can only pull the phone number from the smsMessage. I need to check to see if the phone number that is calling is in the users contacts first and if it is display the name if it is not then display the number.

Answer 1

Yes, this is possible using ContactsContract.PhoneLookup.CONTENT_FILTER_URI in Android 2.0 and higher and Contacts.Phones.CONTENT_FILTER_URL in Android 1.6 and earlier.

For example usage, see the documentation for ContactsContract.PhoneLookup. Excerpt below:

// Android 1.6 and earlier (backwards compatible for Android 2.0+)
Uri uri = Uri.withAppendedPath(Contacts.Phones.CONTENT_FILTER_URL, Uri.encode(phoneNumber));

// Android 2.0 and later
Uri uri = Uri.withAppendedPath(ContactsContract.PhoneLookup.CONTENT_FILTER_URI, Uri.encode(phoneNumber));

// Query the filter URI
String[] projection = new String[]{ PhoneLookup.DISPLAY_NAME, ...
Cursor cursor = context.getContentResolver().query(uri, projection, ...

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UPDATE: The format of the phone number does not matter. Comparison is robust and highly optimized on Android; it's done using a native sqlite function named PHONE_NUMBERS_EQUAL. For more details, search the codebase for this method. By the way, I'm not certain if it's safe to use that function directly in your own apps, but I wouldn't.