Preventing autolinking of emails and URLs in an Android WebView

Question

I have a WebView which may contain data that appears to be getting "auto linked". Something that looks like an email address is becoming clickable, even though it's now within an <a> tag or has an onclick attribute. How do I disable this auto-linking?

I've looked thorugh the WebView docs, as well as the WebSettings docs, but didn't seem to see anything that mentions this behavior.

Answer 1

That appears to be unchangeable functionality of the WebView.

You could do the opposite of this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1744091/is-there-any-way-to-have-webview-auto-link-urls-and-phone-numbers-in-android and create a javascript link stripper (instead of the proposed link injector there).

Not sure what else would work for this.

Answer 2

Hi Squeaggy why you do want to eliminate that funcionality from the webview, but well a tricky way would be including onClick="return false;" in the anchor tag that contains the email or URL.

<a onClick=\"return false;\">[email protected]</a>