Disabling automatic phone number detection

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Level 1

11 points

Disabling automatic phone number detection

There is a feature in MacOS where certain strings of numbers get automatically recognized as phone numbers and turned into "tel:" links. Clicking on them makes a system beep. Long-clicking or clicking on the little arrow icon that appears brings up contacts. It is not possible to highlight a subset of the number.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of false positives and product codes, bank account numbers, invoice numbers, and the like are routinely misjudged to be phone numbers. For example, in the attached screenshot, it has combined the Item Ref, Catalog Number, and Quantity columns of this invoice into phone numbers. This can turn what should be simple copy-paste operations into a game of trying to figure out what can actually be selected.

Is there any way to turn this off? Either in general or in specific applications such as Preview?

MacBook Pro 13″, macOS 11.4

Posted on Aug 23, 2021 11:37 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

MC1717 Author

Level 1

11 points

Aug 23, 2021 1:40 PM in response to MC1717

Looking through the trackpad settings revealed that the right term for this is "Data Detectors": https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/detect-dates-contacts-documents-mac-mh35744/mac

Both that link above and other threads about this (e.g., https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251699374 ) suggest that there should be a Substitutions submenu in the Edit menu. I can find this toggle in TextEdit and Mail, but not in Preview…

It looks like there used to be a way to disable it from the command line with a "defaults write …" incantation, but that apparently stopped working as of Mountain Lion. So, I'm more enlightened now, but still stuck.

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

239,363 points

Aug 23, 2021 1:29 PM in response to MC1717

I wonder if you have to rebuild the Spotlight index after unchecking things?

How to rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac

If searching your Mac doesn’t return expected results, rebuilding the Spotlight index might help.

Choose Apple menu () > System Preferences, then click Spotlight.
Click the Privacy tab.
Drag the folder or disk that you want to index again to the list of locations that Spotlight is prevented from searching. Or click the Add (+) button and select the folder or disk to add.
To add an item to the Privacy tab, you must have ownership permissions for that item. To learn about permissions, choose Help from the Finder menu bar, then search for “permissions.”
From the same list of locations, select the folder or disk that you just added. Then click the Remove (–) button to remove it from the list.
Quit System Preferences. Spotlight will reindex the contents of the folder or disk.

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Answer 3

MC1717 Author

Level 1

11 points

Aug 23, 2021 1:07 PM in response to BDAqua

Thanks for the suggestion, but no luck. I just tried turning off things like Contacts and Siri Suggestions in the spotlight search results. This affected what showed up in a spotlight search, but not the telephone number recognition.

I also tried turning off Siri for Contacts, Messages, and FaceTime, and that also had no effect on this.

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