Specify phone type

[pigmonkey]

Most of my contacts have multiple phone numbers. I need some way to keep straight which is which. Currently I'm adding them like this:

$ ppl phone jdoe "1115551234 (work)"
$ ppl phone jdoe "1115556789 (cell)"

This works fine, but the vCard specification does include telephone types. As seen in the Wikipedia example:

TEL;TYPE=WORK,VOICE:(111) 555-1212
TEL;TYPE=HOME,VOICE:(404) 555-1212

It would be nice if ppl supported this. It could be achieved like this:

$ ppl phone jdoe --type work 1115551234
$ ppl phone jdoe --type cell 1115556789

The --type argument would be optional so it shouldn't break compatibility with previous versions.

[pigmonkey]

I've been playing around with using ppl's vcards to build the contacts on my phone. Unfortunately, it doesn't work too well because I have a bunch of phone numbers like 1115556789 (cell). My phone doesn't know what to think about letters and parenthesis in phone numbers!

[henrycatalinismith]

Haha, that sounds pretty annoying. Yeah, ppl has some growing to do so that users can represent data like this in an RFC-compliant way.

I'm eager to be able to mark phone numbers in this way, myself. Don't worry, this is definitely gonna get added.

[henrycatalinismith]

This is in 1.21.0. Thanks for motivating me to build this. I've been needing it myself for some time.

I mentioned RFC compliance earlier in this thread. In fact, I learned today that RFC 2426 is pretty strict about which values it considers valid in the TYPE field.

   tel-type     = "HOME" / "WORK" / "PREF" / "VOICE" / "FAX" / "MSG"
                / "CELL" / "PAGER" / "BBS" / "MODEM" / "CAR" / "ISDN"
                / "VIDEO" / "PCS" / iana-token / x-name
        ; Values are case insensitive

This came up because the gem I'm using for vCard encoding & decoding made me jump through some hoops to decode standard and non-standard values simultaneously.

The upshot of this is that ppl is perfectly happy to help you create vCards that aren't RFC-compliant. It seems that pretty much all address book software does this, though. Personally, I don't think it's worth worrying about, and I'm pretty much only even writing this as a means of going on record to say "I know this allows non-standard vCards to be created, and I don't mind".

[henrycatalinismith]

Oops, missed something

Phone Numbers:
  #<Ppl::Entity::PhoneNumber:0x000000013e4238>

Fixed now.