How to Disable Phone Number Highlighting/Linking on iOS

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Level 1

6 points

How to Disable Phone Number Highlighting/Linking on iOS

Hi all,

one thing constantly annoying me is the fact that iOS seems to detect almost every conceivable sequence of digits as a phone number, highlights it by making it look as a link, and keeps me from just copy/pasting it as an ordinary character sequence. It lets me do a "copy phone number", but as soon as I try to paste it somewhere, it messes it up, with a "tel:..." prefix and stripping some digits of it. There doesn't seem to be an option to "Just Copy"...

This is certainly the most annoying feature of iOS for me right now. And things like this tend to happen when you create software that tries to get super smart and claims to know the user's intentions better than the user itself.

How can I turn off the phone number detection feature, or how can I copy a phone number into the clipboard as just another sequence of characters, without any interpretation?

Thanks!

iPhone 7, iOS 11.1

Posted on Nov 15, 2017 4:30 AM

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Answer 1

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phonehoppy Author

Level 1

6 points

Nov 15, 2017 4:47 AM in response to phonehoppy

OK, I found a "workaround": You can use the text selection feature in many texts containing a phone number by starting the selection on a character somewhat before the beginning of the phone number, then drag the end of the selection just after the end of the phone number, and then drag the start of the selection to the position just before the phone number, then tap on the selection and select "copy". This works if there is text before and after the number, but you have to be really careful moving your fingers...

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