When I find myself in an airport, I sometimes take a little time to say hi to a bunch of people who are suddenly just a local call a way. Or sometimes I’m thinking of going somewhere, and instead of flipping through my phone’s address book, I’ll check my computer to see who might be interested.

You can use this function to filter phone numbers in your BBDB based on a regular expression. As usual, leaving the regular expression blank means that all records with phone numbers will be displayed. By default, the function works on the currently displayed records, allowing you to apply multiple filters. You can call it with a universal prefix argument (C-u M-x sacha/bbdb-find-people-with-phones) to match against all contacts in your database.

Here’s the code:

(defun sacha/bbdb-find-people-with-phones (&optional regexp records)
  "Search for phone numbers that match REGEXP in BBDB RECORDS.
Without a prefix argument, filter the list of displayed records.
Call with a prefix argument to search the entire database.  This
works best if you use a consistent format to store your phone
numbers.  The search will strip out non-numeric characters. For
example, +1-888-123-4567 will be treated as +18001234567.

To search for all numbers in Toronto, search for
\"+1\\(416\\|647\\)\". If you search for certain areas
frequently, it might be a good idea to define a function for
them."
  (interactive (list (read-string "Regexp: ")
		     (if current-prefix-arg
			 (bbdb-records)
		       (or bbdb-records (bbdb-records)))))
  (let (filtered next)
    (while records
      (when
          (and (bbdb-record-get-field-internal
		(if (arrayp (car records))
		    (car records)
		  (caar records)) 'phone)
               (or
                (null regexp)
		(string= regexp "")
                (delq nil
                      (mapcar
                       (lambda (phone)
			 (when (string-match regexp (sacha/bbdb-phone-string phone))
			   (concat (bbdb-phone-location phone) ": " (bbdb-phone-string phone))))
                       (bbdb-record-get-field-internal
                        (if (arrayp (car records))
                            (car records)
                          (caar records)) 'phone)))))
        (setq filtered (cons (if (arrayp (car records))
                                 (car records)
                               (caar records)) filtered)))
      (setq records (cdr records)))
    (bbdb-display-records (nreverse filtered))))

(defun sacha/bbdb-phone-string (&optional phone)
  "Strip non-numeric characters from PHONE, except for +."
  (replace-regexp-in-string "[^+1234567890]" "" (bbdb-phone-string phone)))
   
(defun sacha/bbdb-yank-phones ()
  "Copy a phone list into the kill ring."
  (interactive)
  (kill-new
   (mapconcat
    (lambda (record)
      (mapconcat
       (lambda (phone)
	 (concat (bbdb-record-name (car record)) "\t" 
                 (bbdb-phone-location phone) "\t"
		 (bbdb-phone-string phone)))
        (bbdb-record-get-field-internal (car record) 'phone)
        "\n"))
    bbdb-records
    "\n")))