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Querying a Telephone Number

When you perform a query on a telephone number, the country code of the default country specified in your computer's regional settings automatically prefixes the query (unless the default country is the United States, in which case no prefix is added). For example, if the default country is Germany, and you type 0181 in the telephone field of a query, the German country code (+49) is added to the query (that is, +49*0181*).

To find a number for a country other than the default country, you must specify the country code in the query. To avoid limiting the query to one country, you must refine the query and remove the country code portion.

For example, a European user enters the phone numbers of his business contacts throughout the continent. Whenever he travels to another country, he sets the default country on his laptop computer to that country. When he is in Germany, he needs local phone numbers; therefore, German numbers are returned by default on each query. If he wants to find the number of a contact in England while in Germany, he must enter +44 before his query. When he next travels to England, he will not use his German and Italian contacts as much; therefore, only English numbers will be returned (by default) on each query.

CAUTION:  Including a hyphen in your telephone number query will cause the query to fail. Do not include hyphens when querying a telephone number.


 Fundamentals 
 Published: 14 August 2003