Prevent UIWebView from showing UIPopoverController for tel links - ios

Question

I'm working on an iPad application with UIWebView(Deployment target iOS 5.0+).
My UIWebView should do nothing when user taps emails, addresses and phone numbers.
I have a problem with phone numbers. If html page contains links like this: 555-555-5555 when user taps this link UIPopoverController appears(Add to Contacts, Copy).
I have tried next:
Switch off detection in xib file for UIWebView
webView.dataDetectorTypes = UIDataDetectorTypeNone;
call JS - document.documentElement.style.webkitTouchCallout = "none";
UIWebView delegate method shouldStartLoadWithRequest doesn't work for telephone numbers on iPad but works fine on iPhone.
Do you have any ideas?

Answer 1

The reason that particular phone number link isn't getting disabled is that it's not a detected phone number, it's just a regular old <a href=foo> link that happens to have a telephone link for its href attribute. Setting the dataDetectorTypes like you're doing is the the right way to disable phone number detection. So if you have phone numbers just appearing in the web page text somewhere and you want to prevent those from becoming links, keep using webView.dataDetectorTypes = UIDataDetectorTypeNone;.
If you want to disable all links that look like phone numbers you will need to execute a JavaScript after the page has finished loading. In your UIWebView's delegate's webViewDidFinishLoad method use [webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:] and pass in JavaScript to replace the offending links. Here's an example JavaScript that would replace all your tel style links with text elements showing the phone number instead. You might want something slightly different, or maybe you just want to remove the links from the DOM entirely.
var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
for (var j = 0; j < links.length; j++) {
var href=links[j].getAttribute('href');
var prefix = href.substring(0,4);
if (prefix == "tel:") {
var parentNode = links[j].parentNode;
var replacementNode = document.createTextNode(href.substring(prefix.length, href.length));
parentNode.replaceChild(replacementNode, links[j]);
}
}