CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidandroid-webview
SeanPONeil
SeanPONeil

Reputation: 3910

Non-clickable links in WebView

In my app, I am pulling down some HTML from a web service and displaying it in a WebView. Most of the time the app will display links in the HTML just fine, as in they are clickable and open up the Android Browser. Other times, however, the links are not clickable. It turns out sometimes the service will provide HTML with links that are not inside an href, and are just plain text.

Is there anyway for a WebView to parse the HTML and make these links "clickable"? I know the default Android Browser can do it, but I'm not sure about WebViews.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 3398

Answers (1)

Mike Fahy
Mike Fahy

Reputation: 5707

The Webview may not have built-in detectors to auto-link plain URLs within a page, but you could run a JavaScript function within the WebView to parse the URLs when the page finishes loading.

Basically, something like the following (I haven't checked this code for syntax yet, but it should give you the idea):

final WebView webview = (WebView)findViewById(R.id.browser);
/* JavaScript must be enabled if you want it to work, obviously */
webview.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);

/* WebViewClient must be set BEFORE calling loadUrl! */
webview.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
    @Override
    public void onPageFinished(WebView view, String url)
    {
        webview.loadUrl("javascript:(function() { " +
                "var exp = /(\b(https?|ftp|file):\/\/[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%?=~_|!:,.;]*[-A-Z0-9+&@#\/%=~_|])/ig; " +
                "document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].innerHTML =  document.getElementsByTagName('body')[0].innerHTML.replace(exp,'<a href='$1'>$1</a>');" +
                "})()");
    }
});

webview.loadUrl("http://code.google.com/android");

Note that the above JavaScript borrows the URL-parsing JavaScript regex from " How to replace plain URLs with links?," and more info can be found on JavaScript injection within the Android WebViewClient reference and at http://lexandera.com/2009/01/injecting-javascript-into-a-webview/ (not me).

Upvotes: 1

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