How to parse and show hyperlinks (phone number/email addresses etc) in UILabel?

Question

Almost everywhere in the iPhone, you can type text and the OS will recognize portion of the text to be hyperlinks (phone numbers, email addresses for example). However I tested this in my own app with a UILabel and it doesn't work. How do I activate this?

Does the iphone sdk provide this functionality out of the box or do I have to do the parsing logic myself (which is a lot of work)?

Answer 1

Give it a shot with a UIWebView.

Answer 2

Might want to check out Styled Labels under the Three20 project.

Answer 3

You could use UITextView as follows:

UITextView *myView = [[UITextView alloc] initWithFrame: frame];
myView.text = @"this is http://google.com link";
myView.editable = NO;
myView.dataDetectorTypes = UIDataDetectorTypeLink;
//cell is the TableView's cell    
[cell.contentView addSubview:myView];
[myView release];

Answer 4

I want to launch my own compose screen when a user clicks on a hyperlinked email address in UITextView. Is this possible? If yes, how do I do it?