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

Same problem in Sencha Touch app solved with meta tag (<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">) in index.html of app.

Answer 2

I had the same problem, but on an iPad web app.

Unfortunately, neither...

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

nor ...

0 = 0
9 = 9

... worked.

But, here's three ugly hacks:

• replacing the number "0" with the letter "O"
• replacing the number "1" with the letter "l"
• insert a meaningless span: e.g., 555.5<span>5</span>5.5555

Depending on the font you use, the first two are barely noticeable. The latter obviously involves superfluous code, but is invisible to the user.

Kludgy hacks for sure, and probably not viable if you're generating your code dynamically from data, or if you can't pollute your data this way.

But, sufficient in a pinch.

Answer 3

I use a zero-width joiner ‍

Just put that somewhere in the phone number and it works for me. Tested in BrowserStack (and Litmus for emails).

Answer 4

I have tested this myself and found that it works although it is certainly not an elegant solution. Inserting an empty span in the phone number will prevent the data detectors from turning it into a link.

(604) 555<span></span> -4321

Answer 5

This answer trumps everything as of 6-13-2012:

<a href="#" style="color: #666666; 
                   text-decoration: none;
                   pointer-events: none;">
  Boca Raton, FL 33487
</a>

Change the color to whatever matches your text, text decoration removes the underline, pointer events stops it from being viewed like a link in a browser (pointer doesn't change to a hand)

This is perfect for HTML emails on ios and browser.

Answer 6

To disable phone number detection on part of a page, wrap the affected text in an anchor tag with href="#". If you do this, mobile Safari and UIWebView should leave it alone.

<a href="#"> 1234567 </a>