Tag: phonebook

If you are writing for Asterisk PBX, you may feel the need to create a public telephone directory.

Today we’ve been putting together Phonebook, a web-based phonebook which pulls data from an asterisk server. We used JQTouch for the interface, with PHP to process data files. We also use a CSV file exported from our hosted gmail to ensure that people’s names are spelled correctly.

The configuration

Asterisk’s configuration files are INI-like, and you’ll find them in /etc/asterisk/ on most systems. Just one important thing though, asterisk lets you use brackets ( ) in caller-IDs, etc, which will cause PHP’s parse_ini_file() function to fizzle out and die due to an alleged syntax error.

To save yourself some trouble, use this little class I wrote, which will load INI data into an associative array:

class ns_ini_parser {
	/* Mike's non-standard INI parser for asterisk files. https://mike42.me
		Note that PHP's parse_ini_file will die with a syntax error on key = value (bracket), which is unacceptable */

	function parse_string($string) {
		$lines		= explode("n", $string);
		$section	= "0";
		$result		= array();
		foreach($lines as $line) {
			$line = trim($line);
			if($line == "" || substr($line, 0,1) == ";") {
				/* Comment, no action */
			} elseif(substr($line, 0,1) == "[") {  /* [section] */
				$l		  = strlen($line);
				$line		  = trim(substr($line, 1, $l - 2));	/* Strip brackets */
				$section	  = $line;
				if(!isset($result[$section])) {
					$result[$section] = array();
				}
			} else {				/* key = val */
				$parts = explode("=", $line);
				$key = trim($parts[0]);	/* The key is everything left of the equal */
				unset($parts[0]);	/* Got that, unset it */
				$val = trim(join("=", $parts));	/* Value is everything on the righht */
				$result[$section][$key] = $val;
			}
		}
		return $result;
	}

	function parse_file($path) {
		$string = file_get_contents($path);
		return $this -> parse_string($string);
	}
}

The example usage below will list user’s extensions next to their caller ID, which you could use for a web phonebook:

/* Example PHP code to parse asterisk configuration */
$config_parser = new ns_ini_parser;
$users  = $config_parser -> parse_file("/etc/asterisk/users.conf");

foreach($users as $id => $user) {
	if(is_numeric($id)) { /* Only show numbers, not other sections */
		echo "<a href="tel:$id">$id</a> ".$user['fullname']."<br />";
	}
}

I don’t think it gets easier than that! I’ll post the rest once you can manage the contacts as well.