Technical Q&A QA1495

Detecting phone numbers and links in an iPhone application

Q: How do I detect phone numbers and links in an iPhone application?

A: How do I detect phone numbers and links in an iPhone application?

As of iPhone OS 3.0, text views and web views support the detection of phone numbers, email addresses, and HTTP links. iPhone OS 3.0 scans for these types of data, highlights them when found, and renders them into clickable URLs as shown in Figure 1. You can detect phone numbers and links programmatically or by using Interface Builder 3.1.2 or later.

**Figure 1** Detecting phone numbers, email addresses, and HTTP links in a text view

Programmatically detecting phone numbers and links

The iPhone OS SDK 3.0 introduces the UIDataDetectorTypes enumeration constant, which defines the types of data that can be found in web views and text views. Table 1 provides a description of these data types.

**Table 1** Types of data detected in web views and text views
Constant	Description
UIDataDetectorTypePhoneNumber	Detect strings formatted as phone numbers.
UIDataDetectorTypeLink	Detect strings formatted as URLs.
UIDataDetectorTypeNone	Do not detect any data.
UIDataDetectorTypeAll	Detect all available types of data. This constant is recommended for detecting data.

To programmatically detect phone numbers or links, create an instance of your view and set its dataDetectorTypes property to one of the data types in Table 1. See Listing 1 for an example that scans for phone numbers, emails, and URLs in a text view.

Listing 1 Programmatically detecting phone number and links in a text view

- (void)viewDidLoad {     self.textView.dataDetectorTypes = UIDataDetectorTypeAll; }

Using Interface Builder

Follow these steps to detect phone numbers and links using Interface Builder 3.1.2 or later:

Open the Nib file containing your web view or text view in Interface Builder.
Select your view, then choose Tools > Attributes Inspector. The Attributes Inspector contains the Detect Phone Numbers and Detect Links options, which respectively turn on phone numbers detection and links (email and URLs) detection.
Check one of these options or both of them according to your needs as shown in Figure 2.

**Figure 2** Turning on both phone number and links in a text view

Reference

UIDataDetectorTypes

Document Revision History

Date	Notes
2009-10-27	New document that describes how to detect phone numbers and links in an iPhone application.