How to disable phone number linking in Mobile Safa

Question

Safari on iPhone automatically creates links for strings of digits that appear to the telephone numbers. I am writing a web page containing an IP address, and Safari is turning that into a phone number link. Is it possible to disable this behavior for a whole page or an element on a page?

Answer 1

<meta name = "format-detection" content = "telephone=no"> does not work for emails: if the HTML you are preparing is for an email, the metatag will be ignored.

If what you are targeting are emails, here's yet another ugly-but-works solution for ya'll:

Example of some HTML you want to avoid being linked or auto formatted:

will cease operations <span class='ios-avoid-format'>on June 1,
2012</span><span></span>.

And the CSS that will make the magic happen:

@media only screen and (device-width: 768px) and (orientation:portrait){
span.ios-date{display:none;}
span.ios-date + span:after{content:"on June 1, 2012";}
}

The drawback: you may need a media query for each of the ipad/iphone portrait/landscape combos

Answer 2

Think I've found a solution: put the number inside a <label> element. Haven't tried any other tags, but <div> left it active on the home screen, even with the telephone=no attribute.

It seems obvious from earlier comments that the meta tag did work, but for some reason has broken under the later versions of iOS, at least under some conditions. I am running 4.0.1.

Answer 3

My experience is the same as some others mentioned. The meta tag...

<meta name = "format-detection" content = "telephone=no">

...works when the website is running in Mobile Safari (i.e., with chrome) but stops working when run as a webapp (i.e., is saved to home screen and runs without chrome).

My less-than-ideal solution is to insert the values into input fields...

<input type="text" readonly="readonly" style="border:none;" value="3105551212">

It's less than ideal because, despite the border being set to none, iOS renders a multi-pixel gray bar above the field. But, it's better than seeing the number as a link.

Answer 4

I too have this problem: Safari and other mobile browsers transform the VAT IDs into phone numbers. So I want a clean method to avoid it on a single element, not the whole page (or site).
I'm sharing a possible solution I found, it is suboptimal but still it is pretty viable: I put, inside the number I don't want to become a tel: link, the ⁠ HTML entity which is the Word-Joiner invisible character. I tried to stay more semantic (well, at least a sort of) by putting this char in some meaning spot, e.g. for the VAT ID I chose to put it between the different groups of digit according to its format so for an Italian VAT I wrote: 0613605⁠048⁠8 which renders in 0613605⁠048⁠8 and it is not transformed in a telephone number.

Answer 5

I was really confused by this for a while but finally figured it out. We made updates to our site and had some numbers converting to a link and some weren't. Turns out that numbers won't be converted to a link if they're in a <fieldset>. Obviously not the right solution for most circumstances, but in some it will be the right one.

Answer 6

Another solution would be to use an image of the IP number