Question

How can I click on a link by using the stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString method in a UIWebView? The actual hyperlink itself is different every time but the wording (“Test”) inside the Test code is always the same.

How would I go about doing this? I have had a suggestion to do the following (which doesn’t work and doesn’t do anything):

var fonts = document.getElementsByTagName('font');
for(i=0;i<fonts.length;i++) {
  if (fonts[i].innerHTML == 'Test') {
  fonts[i].parentNode.childNodes[0].click();
  break;
 }
} 

Answer 1

Looks like you have an answer including the Objective-C code you need, but I would imagine that for the javascript you can simply fire the contents of the link’s onclick or navigate to the appropriate url instead of going through the trouble of simulating a mouse click. Granted, I have not tested this in an iOS app but feel free to give it a shot:

var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
for(i=0;i<links.length;i++) {
  if (links[i].innerHTML.indexOf('Test') != -1) {
  clickLink(links[i]);
  break;
 }
} 

function clickLink(linkobj) {
 var onclickHandler = linkobj.getAttribute('onclick');
 if (onclickHandler == null) window.location = linkobj.getAttribute('href').replace(/^\s\s*/, '').replace(/\s\s*$/, '');
 else eval(onclickHandler(linkobj));
}

By the way, there is an eval in this code that will run the contents of the onclick handler. This can be unsafe. If you only need to navigate to a location specified by the link then you may want to remove the portion dealing with onclick.

A much simpler version of this is printed below (since your sample code does not appear to need to deal with onclick) which may be easier to use. In this case I am calling it after a 1-second delay, but in reality, since it seems that this code runs in response to a trigger on the iOS side (button click?), you should not use a delay and instead simply wait enable the trigger until loading is complete – webViewDidFinishLoad.

function clickLink() {
    var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
    for (i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
        if (links[i].innerHTML.indexOf('Prev') != -1) {
            window.location = links[i].getAttribute('href').replace(/^\s\s*/, '').replace(/\s\s*$/, '');
            break;
        }
    }
}

setTimeout(clickLink, 1000);

jsFiddle which demonstrates this using your sample code: http://jsfiddle.net/fzKL7/5/