How to disable phone number linking in Mobile Safari?

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 tur

Answer 1

A trick I use that works on more than just Mobile Safari is to use HTML escape codes and a little mark-up in the phone number. This makes it more difficult for the browser to "identify" a phone number, i.e.

Phone: 1-8&#48;&#48;<span>-</span>62&#48;<span>-</span>38&#48;3

Answer 2

Solution for Webview!

For PhoneGap-iPhone / PhoneGap-iOS applications, you can disable telephone number detection by adding the following to your project’s application delegate:

// ...

- (void)webViewDidStartLoad:(UIWebView *)theWebView 
{
    // disable telephone detection, basically <meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no" />
    theWebView.dataDetectorTypes = UIDataDetectorTypeAll ^ UIDataDetectorTypePhoneNumber;

    return [ super webViewDidStartLoad:theWebView ];
}

// ...

source: Disable Telephone Detection in PhoneGap-iOS.

Answer 3

Break the number down into separate blocks of text

301 <div style="display:inline-block">441</div> 3909

Answer 4

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 5

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.

Answer 6

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.