This is my code
UILongPressGestureRecognizer *longGesture = [[UILongPressGestureRecognizer alloc] initWithTarget:self
action:@selector(handleCatapultLongPress:)];
longGesture.numberOfTapsRequired = 1;
longGesture.numberOfTouchesRequired = 1;
longGesture.minimumPressDuration = 0.5;
longGesture.delegate = self;
longGesture.allowableMovement = 50;

[self.webView addGestureRecognizer:longGesture];

Can’t agree more. This method certainly relies on the fact that the internal view uses UILongPressGestureRecognizer to handle touch events, which can easily change in future releas of iOS. So far it works for for iOS 5 & 6.

As for removing the targets of existing gesture recognizer by accident, this can be fixed by changing the line to

[r removeTarget:self action:@selector(_handleGesture:)];

This removes only the target added by us.

To hook your own code into the already existing long press gesture recognizer looks more elegant, that is correct. The only downside is that you’re relying on a certain structure of the private internals (private API) of the UIWebView object.

I haven’t tested it yet, but I’m not sure if your solution can’t mess up anything. Especially when you remove the targets of the existing gesture recognizers of the target view – which can be an internal private sub view within the UIWebView object – you might break something, because you can not know for what these gesture recognizers are used for. Also it seems that you rely on a long press recognizer that already exists within the UIWebView, in a private subview of this object. And this can be dangerous, because the internal structure of UIWebView can change any time.

- (UIView *)hitTest:(CGPoint)point withEvent:(UIEvent *)event
{
    UIView *targetView = [super hitTest:point withEvent:event];

    // remove any previously registered targets
    for (UIGestureRecognizer *r in targetView.gestureRecognizers) {
        [r removeTarget:self action:nil];
    }

    // register with the first UILongPressGestureRecognizer
    for (UIGestureRecognizer *r in targetView.gestureRecognizers) {
        if ([r isKindOfClass:[UILongPressGestureRecognizer class]]) {
            ((UILongPressGestureRecognizer*)r).minimumPressDuration = 0.5; // optional
            [r addTarget:self action:@selector(_handleGesture:)];
            break;
        }
    }
    
    return targetView;
}

- (void)_handleGesture:(UILongPressGestureRecognizer *)sender {
    if (sender.state == UIGestureRecognizerStateBegan) {
        CGPoint point = [sender locationInView:self];
        [self _contextualMenuAction:point];
    }
}

And for links (“a” tag) the HTML attribute is “href”, so you can access the Url this way:

url = aElement.href

This will also resolve relative URLs, so you always get the full URL here, even if the HTML code uses only relative URLs.

Alternatively you can access the values of the attributes this way:

url = element.getAttribute(“href”)

but this will only return the value as it is giving in the HTML code, so a relative URL is not automatically completed to a full URL.

If this is not working for you, you’re either have done something wrong (typo?), or the document is not a HTML document and doesn’t have a “body” element. In my code snippets I simply assume that the document is a HTML document with a body element.

For web pages with frames or for XML documents, you need to modify the code so it will
also look into frames etc.