How to disable phone number linking in Mobile Safari?

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Safari on iPhone automatically creates links for strings of digits that appear to the telephone numbers. I am writing a web page containing an IP address, and Safari is turning that into a phone number link. Is it possible to disable this behavior for a whole page or an element on a page?

24 Answers

This seems to be the right thing to do, according to the Safari HTML Reference:

<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">

If you disable this but still want telephone links, you can still use the "tel" URI scheme.

Here is the relevant page at Apple's Developer Library.

Add this, I think it is what you're looking for:

<meta name = "format-detection" content = "telephone=no">

You could try encoding them as HTML entities:

&#48; = 0
&#57; = 9

Adding the meta tag to turn off format detection did not work for me. I was trying to display a zoom meeting ID in a <p> tag along with other text and iOS was turning that ID into a tel link. Additionally, I was targeting tel links via a[href^="tel:"] in order to give them custom styling so disabling the styles on tel links was not an option.

The solution I found was to wrap the ID number in a <code> tag. This seems to prevent iOS from messing with it.

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