How to open UITextView web links in a UIWebView instead of Safari?

Question

I\'m developing and iPhone 3.0 application. And I\'m trying to open web links in a UITextView into a UIWebView instead of Safari. But still no luck.

The UIText

Answer 1

With Swift 3, UITextViewDelegate provides a textView(_:shouldInteractWith:in:interaction:) method. textView(_:shouldInteractWith:in:interaction:) has the following declaration:

Asks the delegate if the specified text view should allow the specified type of user interaction with the given URL in the given range of text.

optional func textView(_ textView: UITextView,  shouldInteractWith URL: URL,  in characterRange: NSRange,  interaction: UITextItemInteraction) -> Bool

---

The following code shows how to open UITextView web links in a SFSafariViewController instead of opening them in Safari app:

import UIKit
import SafariServices

class ViewController: UIViewController, UITextViewDelegate {

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()

        // Set textView
        let textView = UITextView()
        textView.text = "http://www.yahoo.fr http://www.google.fr"
        textView.isUserInteractionEnabled = true
        textView.isEditable = false
        textView.isSelectable = true
        textView.dataDetectorTypes = UIDataDetectorTypes.link

        // Add view controller as the textView's delegate
        textView.delegate = self

        // auto layout
        view.addSubview(textView)
        textView.translatesAutoresizingMaskIntoConstraints = false
        textView.centerXAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.centerXAnchor).isActive = true
        textView.centerYAnchor.constraint(equalTo: view.centerYAnchor).isActive = true
        textView.heightAnchor.constraint(equalToConstant: 300).isActive = true
        textView.widthAnchor.constraint(equalToConstant: 300).isActive = true
    }

    func textView(_ textView: UITextView, shouldInteractWith URL: URL, in characterRange: NSRange, interaction: UITextItemInteraction) -> Bool {
        // Open links with a SFSafariViewController instance and return false to prevent the system to open Safari app
        let safariViewController = SFSafariViewController(url: URL)
        present(safariViewController, animated: true, completion: nil)

        return false
    }

}

Answer 2

The simplest way is to override the webView:decidePolicyForNavigationAction:request:frame:decisionListener: method on UITextView like so:

@interface UITextView (Override)
@end

@class WebView, WebFrame;
@protocol WebPolicyDecisionListener;

@implementation UITextView (Override)

- (void)webView:(WebView *)webView decidePolicyForNavigationAction:(NSDictionary *)actionInformation request:(NSURLRequest *)request frame:(WebFrame *)frame decisionListener:(id < WebPolicyDecisionListener >)listener
{
    NSLog(@"request: %@", request);
}
@end

This will affect all UITextViews in your application. If you only require this on a single view, create a subclass and override the method on that.

_{Note: this is technically a private API and could be removed at any time. There is no way to do this via the public API.}

edit: as of iOS 7.0 a new method has been introduced on UITextViewDelegate to support this. See nihad's answer for details.

Answer 3

This is an old question but incase anyone is looking for an updated way of doing this.

Assign your viewController that holds the UITextView as a delegate in your viewController's .m file and just add:

-(BOOL)textView:(UITextView *)textView shouldInteractWithURL:(NSURL *)URL inRange:(NSRange)characterRange{

    //Do something with the URL
    NSLog(@"%@", URL);


    return NO;
}