Disable the automatic Linkify of Webview

Question

I have a webview that I am creating. It seems to automatically be linkifying numbers into tel: urls. I didn\'t see a way to remove this ability (at least nothing similar t

Answer 1

There is a way to do that - rather ugly, two layered, but still a workaround.

You should

1. modify how the webview will handle the auto-linkifiable items

2. explicitly tell the loaded page not to apply styles and haptic feedback.

   mWebView.setWebViewClient( new WebViewClient() {
   
   @Override
   public boolean shouldOverrideUrlLoading(WebView view, final String url) {
       Uri uri = Uri.parse(url);
   
       //TODO analyse the uri here 
       //and exclude phone and email from triggering any action
   
       return false;
   }
   
   public void onReceivedError(WebView view, int errorCode, 
                                           String description, String failingUrl) {}
   
   public void onPageFinished (WebView view, String url) {...}
   
   public void onPageStarted(WebView view, String url, Bitmap favicon) {...}
   
   public void onLoadResource(WebView view, String url) {...}
   }); 
   

   In the html specify the following meta tags inside the tag:

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

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I'm surprised to see it is launching Dialer on selecting a number from your own WebView.

Unless, you override WebViewClient::shouldOverrideUrlLoading() and detect the url scheme has "tel" and start Dialer activity, it will never launch a Dialer from your WebView. Are you sure you are not handling tel: scheme in shouldOverrideUrlLoading()?

Answer 3

You can find the code that do the real detection in external/webkit/WebKit/android/nav/CacheBuilder.cpp : FindPartialNumber() and so on.

You can disable it or change the logic as you like.