How do I know if text contains URL links (UIWebView)

Question

I have some text which might or might not contain web URLs, phone numbers, email links etc. which UIWebView automatically detects as hotspots.

Question: I want to show this text in UIWebView ONLY when there are one or more hotspots, but as plain text if it doesn't. So how can I detect this in code?

Additional Info: JavaScript code below tells how many <a href="...">...</a> links there are. This does NOT count how many other "link" items there are. For example "Link to www.yle.fi" contains one link according to UIWebView, but zero according to JavaScript:

NSString *s = [webView stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:
                @"document.links.length"];

Still no answer to the question how to ask UIWebView how many links it has found...

Answer 1

You can use several regular expressions and check if the text matches those of URL/phone number/email addresses.

However, if your intention is simply let the user open a link, the UITextView is suffice.

Check the dataDetectorTypes property.