When iOS interprets data as phone numbers

While developing an mobile website that used geolocation, I noticed that long latitude numbers on screen changed into links. At first I thought it was a jQuery error, but the problem persisted without any JavaScript at all.

• I discovered that appending letters, a–z, prevented the problem.
• The problem occured in the iPhone simulator, but not desktop Safari.
• I tried <meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no" /> from Apple’s meta tag reference. No luck.
• I tried converting the number to a string in JavaScript. Still no luck.
• I could work around the issue by styling my links to resemble text, but who wants to sacrifice user interface for a hack?

Solution

Turns out that iOS on iPhones, simulated or not, always tries to read certain strings as phone numbers. We appended ° to the end of each latitude and longitude numbers, and it worked.