IE: Option to disable automatic creation of links

[Alfonso Martínez de Lizarrondo]

In IE when the user types something that looks like an url or mail it's automatically converted to a link. Sometimes is useful and it has been requested that this feature is available also in other browsers #302

But it's also a source of problems and other people prefer to not have this option enabled and now it will be possible with IE9: ​http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2010/09/15/IE9-Beta-Minor-Change-List.aspx

document.execCommand("AutoUrlDetect", false, false) 

My proposal is to introduce a new config setting similar to the ones for Firefox to disable object resizing or table editing, and by default make it behave like other browsers. After all, it should be possible to watch the keyboard and do the autodetection ourselves with a plugin and it will work the same way in all the browsers and we could tune it because previously it was detecting too many things for some users.

Also it's important to test it before the final IE9 is released in order to detect any bug with the new option at their side.

[Alejandro]

My situation is that I do not want a URL is detected.

I have always activated paste as plain text, so anyone can get unwanted malicious links. The problem is that if I write a text with a url, it automatically detects and converts the url into a link, when it should be plain text, for example, write this: "This is a test with a link to the website of CKEditor, www.ckeditor.com. If I keep typing the url is active as a link."

That url is activated and becomes binding. How could I turn off this transformation?

[Jakub Ś]

Two tickets #8202 and #7376 which thouch upon IE auto-linking were reported by users.

[Brandon]

In our case, CKEditor is integrated into a forum platform. While users want to submit a link sometimes, they already can do so. With this behavior, they have no way to submit a URL that is not linked.

More specifically, we try to sniff out media videos (i.e. links to youtube) and auto-embed the video, but only if it is *not* hyperlinked (in case the user simply wanted to link to the video, and not embed it). Because the URL is being automatically hyperlinked in IE, we have no way to differentiate between whether the user intended to do this, or whether it was done automatically.

I agree, a config option to turn this off would be ideal. Those that want the functionality can have it, while those who don't can disable it.

[Jakub Ś]

A bug concerning this issue was reported here #8219

[ananthand]

Is there any other option to avoid auto linking in IE8.

[Jakub Ś]

#1382 was markes as duplicate.

IE10 has been release and there is still no api to disable this. I'm marking this issue as Can't Fix.

[Alfonso Martínez de Lizarrondo]

Sorry, but I don't understand this last comment.

In the description of the ticket I pointed exactly to the API that Microsoft introduced in IE9 to disable this behavior, so you can say that you don't want to use it, but not that the API doesn't exists.

[Brandon]

Indeed, the blog entry spells this out as

---

Prior to IE9, it was not possible to specify IDM_AUTOURLDETECT_MODE from JavaScript, meaning that pages could not disable automatic hyperlinking in ContentEditable areas. A new command constant AutoUrlDetect is supported in IE9, allowing script to disable automatic hyperlinking as follows: document.execCommand("AutoUrlDetect", false, false)

[Jakub Ś]

Sorry, but I don't understand this last comment.

My bad @alfonsoml. I was closing a lot of tickets that day and... to be honest, when reading this ticket today, I don't know what I was thinking then. Sorry for that.

My comment should probably should something like: It is now possible to disable autolinking in IE9-10 but this is and will be a Can't Fix issue in IE7-8. This of course doesn't make this ticket Can't Fix or Vendor Fix thus I'm removing keywords.

Thanks for pointing this out and again sorry for the mess.

[Jakub Ś]

#14674 was marked as duplicate.