Prevent skype highlighting from corrupting textareas

Question

In short, a text area programatically populated with a phone number in it, with the Skype plugin installed, produces the highlighting tags.

Thus,

(418) 555-1234

becomes

begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (418) 555-1234 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

And if that string is put inside the textarea, the Skype highlighting will encapsulate it again, Ad infinitum.

How do you prevent that?

Answer 1

You should have a look at http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=96959&st=0

Looks like it is a reported bug, but not solved until now.

Suggestions are to use a meta tag (which seems to not work across all Skype plugins)

<meta name="SKYPE_TOOLBAR" content="SKYPE_TOOLBAR_PARSER_COMPATIBLE" />

Introduce a non visible character that will break the skype algorithm for identifying phones

+123 456<span style="display:none;">_</span> 789

(don't think this can work with textareas though)

And of course disable the plugin, if the issue is with your own access to that page.

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Update

Check if any of the two examples in http://www.jsfiddle.net/gaby/Qy7uw/ work. (i do not have skype to check)

I am using the zero-width-joiner ‍ and the familiar  

Answer 2

Using CSS only, it can be removed by overriding the styles used by Skype. Try adding these two lines to your stylesheet:

span.skype_pnh_container {display:none !important;}
span.skype_pnh_print_container {display:inline !important;}

edit Skype have started to add unique numbers to the classes, you can solve it using the new Css 3 selector:

span.skype_pnh_container {display:none !important;}
span.skype_pnh_print_container, span[class^="skype_pnh_print_container"] {display:inline !important;}