How to Click Specific Text in a WKWebView to Perform an Action in Swift

Question

I'm using a WKWebview on my story board. I need a way for clicking on specific text to perform an action.

Assume I have a webkit added:

@IBOutlet weak var webkit: WKWebView!

And then later on I have:

webkit.loadHTMLString("Click here or there for different actions", baseURL: nil)

How could I set this up so that clicking on the word "here" would perform code of my choosing, and clicking on "there" would perform different code of my choosing.

It needs to be set up in a webkit like this because I need to use html (the above is just an example).

I had thought about trying to do this through linking. For example:

webkit.loadHTMLString("Click <a href=''>here</a> or there for different actions", baseURL: nil)

And then run something like I found in this question's answer:

func webView(_ webView: WKWebView, decidePolicyFor navigationAction: WKNavigationAction, decisionHandler: @escaping (WKNavigationActionPolicy) -> Void) {
    if navigationAction.navigationType == WKNavigationType.linkActivated {

        print("run code")

        decisionHandler(WKNavigationActionPolicy.cancel)
        return
    }      
    decisionHandler(WKNavigationActionPolicy.allow)
}

However this seems messy as I don't actually need website links. And this only works for one specific action. Clicking on any link would allow me to run some kind of code, but I want specific code for specific words.

Any guidance would be greatly appreciated!

Using this approach, you can set the url to be the same as the `clickable text`. Then in your `decidePolicyFor` method, access the `url` using `navigationAction.request.url` — Malik, Apr 13 '18 at 05:03
@Malik Thanks. This actually works really well and I'd be happy to accept it as the answer. One question though, is there any way to deal with non English characters? I'm trying to pass foreign characters through the html and it ends up converting them to symbols. — Adam S., Apr 14 '18 at 20:49
I haven't used foreign characters with `` so I'm not really sure. But if it is converting them to symbols, then it depends on what type of symbols is it converting them into. Think in terms of coding and decoding. If, for example, it is converting them from ASCII to Unicode, you can convert it back to ASCII. Please note that this is a very basic example. The point is to figure out what sort of conversion is being applied. Once you figure that out, you can reverse the conversion before accessing the method — Malik, Apr 16 '18 at 00:57
Can you give me an example URL and what is it converted into? I'll see if I can come up with the conversion process — Malik, Apr 16 '18 at 00:58

How to Click Specific Text in a WKWebView to Perform an Action in Swift

0 Answers0