UIWebView open links in Safari

Question

I have a very simple UIWebView with content from my application bundle. I would like any links in the web view to open in Safari instead of in the web view. Is this possible?

Answer 1

The accepted answer does not work.

If your page loads URLs via Javascript, the navigationType will be UIWebViewNavigationTypeOther. Which, unfortunately, also includes background page loads such as analytics.

To detect page navigation, you need to compare the [request URL] to the [request mainDocumentURL].

This solution will work in all cases:

- (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)view shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)type
{
    if ([[request URL] isEqual:[request mainDocumentURL]])
    {
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[request URL]];
        return NO;
    }
    else
    {       
        return YES;
    }
}

Answer 2

The other answers have one problem: they rely on the action you do and not on the link itself to decide whether to load it in Safari or in webview.

Now sometimes this is exactly what you want, which is fine; but some other times, especially if you have anchor links in your page, you want really to open only external links in Safari, and not internal ones. In that case you should check the URL.host property of your request.

I use that piece of code to check whether I have a hostname in the URL that is being parsed, or if it is embedded html:

- (BOOL)webView:(UIWebView *)webView shouldStartLoadWithRequest:(NSURLRequest *)request navigationType:(UIWebViewNavigationType)navigationType {
    static NSString *regexp = @"^(([a-zA-Z]|[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9-]*[a-zA-Z0-9])[.])+([A-Za-z]|[A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9-]*[A-Za-z0-9])$";
    NSPredicate *predicate = [NSPredicate predicateWithFormat:@"SELF MATCHES %@", regexp];

    if ([predicate evaluateWithObject:request.URL.host]) {
        [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:request.URL];
        return NO; 
    } else {
        return YES; 
    }
}

You can of course adapt the regular expression to fit your needs.