Get all E-Mail addresses from contacts (iOS)

Question

I know it is possible to pull up a contact and see information based on one contact. But is there any way to get all the emails from the contacts you have entered email addresses for and then store that in a NSArray? This is my first time working with contacts so I don't know much about it.

Answer 1

Yes, you can do this. It seems suspicious that you would want to do this (why do you need this information?), but it isn't difficult to do.

You can use ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople to get an CFArrayRef with all of the people, and then you can query kABPersonEmailProperty of each using ABRecordCopyValue. The code would look something like this (untested):

ABAddressBookRef addressBook = ABAddressBookCreate();
CFArrayRef people = ABAddressBookCopyArrayOfAllPeople(addressBook);
NSMutableArray *allEmails = [[NSMutableArray alloc] initWithCapacity:CFArrayGetCount(people)];
for (CFIndex i = 0; i < CFArrayGetCount(people); i++) {
    ABRecordRef person = CFArrayGetValueAtIndex(people, i);
    ABMultiValueRef emails = ABRecordCopyValue(person, kABPersonEmailProperty);
    for (CFIndex j=0; j < ABMultiValueGetCount(emails); j++) {
        NSString* email = (NSString*)ABMultiValueCopyValueAtIndex(emails, j);
        [allEmails addObject:email];
        [email release];
    }
    CFRelease(emails);
}
CFRelease(addressBook);
CFRelease(people);

(Memory allocation may be a little off; it's been a while since I've developed Cocoa/Core Foundation code.)

But seriously, question why you are doing this. There's a good chance that there's a better solution by just using the Apple-provided APIs to present a contact picker at appropriate times.