How to disable phone number linking in Mobile Safari?

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?

Solution 1:

This seems to be the right thing to do, according to the Safari HTML Reference:

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

If you disable this but still want telephone links, you can still use the "tel" URI scheme.

Here is the relevant page at Apple's Developer Library.

Solution 2:

I use a zero-width joiner &zwj;

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

Solution 3:

To disable the phone parsing appearance for specific elements, this CSS seems to do the trick:

.element { pointer-events: none; }
.element > a { text-decoration:none; color:inherit; }

The first rule disables the click, the second takes care of the styling.

Solution 4:

Add this, I think it is what you're looking for:

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

Solution 5:

I was having the same problem. I found a property on the UIWebView that allows you to turn off the data detectors.

self.webView.dataDetectorTypes = UIDataDetectorTypeNone;