Control text selection behavior in iOS Mobile Safari and/or UIWebView?

Question

I have a long HTML document that contains multiple paragraphs. When I try to select the text either in Mobile Safari on iOS or in a UIWebView, the following happens:

At first, I get character-level precision on my selection.
Then, as I select more, the precision drops to two lines of text and eventually to whole paragraphs. There is no way to end my text selection exactly where I want.

When I set the CSS contentEditable property to true, I retain the character-level precision, but the keyboard also shows up, which of course I don't want.

Is there any way to retain the character-level selection precision no matter how long the text is that I am selecting?

@Unykvis there are lots of different block and inline elements used for styling (divs, spans, etc). — Johannes Fahrenkrug, Feb 07 '14 at 19:13
Can you please try to make 2 paragraphs using
separated from that block? I think you really need to have
between them. — Ignacio Correia, Feb 07 '14 at 19:14
@Unykvis Thank you, but I am interested in a general solution that I can apply to existing documents without modifying their structure or markup. — Johannes Fahrenkrug, Feb 07 '14 at 19:29
You're not going to find a general solution without modifying the webpage structure - it's not like you can edit how mobile Safari handles text selection... — Krease, Feb 08 '14 at 04:49
@JohannesFahrenkrug: Do you resolve this issue means please post your answer. I'm also facing same issue. Thanks. — Senthilkumar, Mar 14 '14 at 04:47
@Senthilkumar No, unfortunately I could not find a solution yet. — Johannes Fahrenkrug, Mar 14 '14 at 18:13
@JohannesFahrenkrug Any luck in the last year? Facing the same problem. — empedocle, Jul 09 '15 at 23:55
@empedocle Not really, unfortunately. See my updated answer about the Kindle app... — Johannes Fahrenkrug, Jul 10 '15 at 13:15
@JohannesFahrenkrug That's unfortunate. If you ever figure out JavaScript selection, that'd be interesting. Maybe iBooks does that as well. — empedocle, Jul 10 '15 at 16:44

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:53

iOS 8's WKWebView might be able to solve this problem. WKWebViewConfiguration has a property called selectionGranularity. The comment reads:

The level of granularity with which the user can interactively select content in the web view. Possible values are described in WKSelectionGranularity. The default value is WKSelectionGranularityDynamic.

One of the two possible values is WKSelectionGranularityCharacter. The comment says:

Selection endpoints can be placed at any character boundary.

I have not tried it yet, but it sounds very promising!

Update 7/6/15: It looks like it's not that easy: Text Selection in WKWebView: WKSelectionGranularityCharacter

Update 7/10/15: When you closely investigate the iOS Kindle app, you can see that they have re-implemented "native" text selection in JavaScript because they couldn't make native text selection behave the way they wanted to. I'm pretty sure they must have tried everything else before they decided to re-implement it.

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 08 '17 at 05:47

0

I meet the same problem,

I solve this by a line of CSS:

display: inline-block;

Both works on Safari and the WebView.

answered Mar 08 '17 at 05:47

McAgee

148
4

Thank you. Could you explain in more detail how this solves this problem, esp when loading arbitrary web sites? – Johannes Fahrenkrug Mar 08 '17 at 16:19

score -2 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 28 '14 at 03:31

-2

Since you are also selecting the title of the text, the browser recognize it as a complete text and select the whole paragraph. By the way there is no way to help you without seeing the HTML source code !

answered Jun 28 '14 at 03:31

Jafar Akhondali

1,552
1
11
25

score -3 · Answer 4 · answered Aug 29 '14 at 10:57

-3

Hey you can use CSS property for not letting user to select text. You can use like:

html
{
   user-select:none;
}

answered Aug 29 '14 at 10:57

Nikita

193
3
10

Thank you, but I **want** to select text, but in a more precise way. – Johannes Fahrenkrug Aug 29 '14 at 12:47

Control text selection behavior in iOS Mobile Safari and/or UIWebView?

4 Answers4

Linked