Comments on: Search and highlight text in UIWebView

By: Alexander

Alexander — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:00:07 +0000

It looks like the UC Browser only uses the standard contextual menu of UIWebView, and this does always work, even with cross-domain iframes. But it only has the items “Copy ” and “Open”.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:44:07 +0000

@Alexander
Did you hear about UC Web Browse? A Chinese company’s product, it can show the context menu when you long press at the cross-domain-iframe area. I don’t know how they do that. They announce that they has their own web-engine base on webkit, and the html5test shows that UC’s scores is different from the safari mobile. But I’m not sure if they REALLY use their own engine.

By: Alexander

Alexander — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 11:18:00 +0000

@Alex
No, Apple does not allow other web engines. You have to use the one that is built.in in the iOS.

By: coder

coder — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 04:56:14 +0000

Thanks Alexander, I considered your solution but thought could be time consuming for large html files in fact what I did is I stored the set of words to be searched for in an array and as I go over the nodes recursively I check the words in the array consecutively if one fails I restore the index to start the search for the words all over again, if all the nodes verify the words consecutively so its a match. The hard part was to delete the words and replace them highlighted ones but at the end it worked.
Thank you very much for your solution it also inspired me for other functions.

By: Alex

Alex — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:22:54 +0000

Thanks Alexander, does Apple allow apps to build their own webkit themself?

By: Alexander

Alexander — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:15:02 +0000

@Alex
Yes, for different domains, there’s no solution. In this case you can’t do anything,

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 11:10:58 +0000

Thanks Alexander.
yeah, I did it as you said, but it doesn’t work in this situation: the main page and the iFrame/Frame page are from different domain.
I try to find some cross-domain solution, but i get nothing.
it seems need to call the private APIs of webkit. but Apple not allow to do this.
It made me mad!

By: Alexander

Alexander — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:26:12 +0000

@Alex
Search frames is done in the same way as searching the main document. You only need to iterate through all of the frames and search here in the same way. frames are also “window” objects in JavaScript. And the “document” property that is used in my code directly is just a short form for “window.document”, so you can use this document for frame objects as well.
To get the frames of a window (or frame) use the “frames” property of this window object (window.frames). This property is an array and lists all frames of that window/frame.

By: Alexander

Alexander — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:20:04 +0000

@coder
Searching will be more difficult in this case. You need to keep track of partly found search terms and check if adjacent text nodes contain the other parts of the search term. There are multiple ways to implement this. None is really simple. One simple approach might be to first combine all texts in all nodes into a single string, and also create a list or array of nodes and offsets which will tell you where within this string the nodes of the HTML string are starting and ending. This way the searching is easy, because you only have one single string. and getting to the actual nodes is also not that complicated anymore.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 07:42:25 +0000

Hi, Alexander,
I got a problem, how to search the text in iFrame/Frameset?
Thanks!

By: coder

coder — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 10:36:08 +0000

Hy again! Old problem solved and another problem occured. If the nodes in my html file are made of one word each, how can modify the search so I can search for several words together.
thanks in advance.

By: srinivas

srinivas — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:16:46 +0000

thanks alexander for your clarification,
i am also against this option but client wants it

one suggestion: impliment threaded views from wp admin area so that comments looks well and easy to understand.

thanks

By: coder

coder — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 10:46:56 +0000

hy, Thank you for this blog, for posting the code and for the clear explanation, it was extremely useful, but what I need is to search in several html files not only one, I was wondering if it was doable, and if u give me a hint for doing it,
Thanks again.

By: Alexander

Alexander — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 18:50:43 +0000

@srinivas
IMHO, zooming should be done as in any other App by pinch gestures or by double-tapping. Using buttons is probably not the best way to do this.

Changing the zoom level manually is not that easy. You can do this by adding or changing a META tag for the “viewport” in the HTML code. Also the following Javascript code should work: document.body.style.zoom=10;

By: srinivas

srinivas — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 13:35:56 +0000

hi,
i am using your code in my app and i want to add two button for zoom in and zoom out
when clicked on, webview text should zoom in or out

how can i do this?

please tell me.

thanks