Disable telephone number detection in PhoneGap-iOS

MyProjectAppDelegate.m

// ...

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

    return [ super webViewDidStartLoad:theWebView ];
}

// ...

Hi mwbrooks,

It does indeed work :) but I'm getting a constant error in the console log:

UIDataDetectorTypeLegacyPhoneNumber is incompatible with other types (-2)

..it keeps repeating itself every second :/
Tested under XCode 4.0.2 & Phonegap 1.0.0
Thanks,
Frank

Hey @onlyfrank,

I've noticed that also. Maybe that approach has been deprecated in XCode 4.x?

any workaround for the console log spamming?

I think the above gist can be considered deprecated / obsolete. In PhoneGap-iPhone 1.x, you can now open PhoneGap.plist and toggle the boolean DetectPhoneNumber

It doesn't appear that iOS4.x actually pays attention to the boolean. On PG1.0, on iOS4.3, the phone numbers are still clickable. On iOS5 GA, they are not.

I think what it means is that ALL ^ PhoneNumber is logically wrong (given their setup). If I change it to a conjunct of the ones I want (i.e. everything but phone number) the spamming goes away, e.g.

[theWebView setDataDetectorTypes: UIDataDetectorTypeLink & UIDataDetectorTypeAddress];

Did some tests:

    // pretty obvious, but tmp0 NOT equivalent to tmp below, but what we are doing in tmp is what we want conceptually in tmp0
    NSUInteger tmp0 = UIDataDetectorTypeLink | UIDataDetectorTypeAddress | UIDataDetectorTypeCalendarEvent; 
    // what we want originally
    NSUInteger tmp = UIDataDetectorTypeAll ^ UIDataDetectorTypePhoneNumber; // this ALONE does not produce the warning
    theWebView.dataDetectorTypes = tmp0; // ADDING this does NOT produce the warning
    theWebView.dataDetectorTypes = tmp; // ADDING this produces the warning

Changing compilers to LLVM only, GCC only or LLVM+GCC does not help.

The warning happens in the synthesized function for dataDetectorTypes (more likely it was not synthesized but an explicit function that they constructed setDataDetectorTypes where they do custom verification stuff) which is unfortunately opaque to us. It is best to bitwise OR the values to combine them - setDataDetectorTypes just doesn't like the XORed number somehow.

erp, yes OR

The following seems to work fine for me with XCode 4.3, iOS 5.0.1 and PhoneGap 1.4.1 =)

theWebView.dataDetectorTypes = UIDataDetectorTypeAll & ! UIDataDetectorTypePhoneNumber;

shanesmith's code worked fine for me as well. Tested it on Xcode 4.5.2, iOS 6 & PhoneGap 1.4.1

You can also disable telephone number highlighting using this meta tag.
meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no"