Always load // protocol as http://, not file://

Question

In my app, I load local files with the file:// protocol in a UIWebView. I do however also load several http:// protocol resources in those files, which in turn load other resources, but rather than using a specific protocol relying on the // protocol (Protocol Relative URL) to use the appropriate protocol, which should be either http:// or https://, but which ends up being file://in my case.

I have been tinkering around this for a while now, trying to replace all // links with http:// through javascript, unsuccessfully, and I'm pretty lost. I can't change the code that requests the // links, and iOS/Webkit automatically assumes that file:// is the right protocol to use.

Is there a way around this, making iOS always use http:// in place of //, or any other way that would work?

Answer 1

After looking over it again, I realised I didn't really need to use the file-protocol at all – I simply get the HTML from the local file, input that into the UIWebView using loadHTMLString: baseURL:, and set the baseURL to http://domain.com. That way, the protocol used is HTTP.

This solution did involve quite some tinkering with the webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType: and back/forward history changes, but it is nothing compared to trying to change the protocols.

If anyone has other solutions, I'm very interested to see them!