Develop Reference

Android create Spannable which does not wrap

I have a following issue with laying out text on Android. I'm basically trying to have two lines of text with minimal spacing and each should be styled differently. I've had quite good working solution with two singlelined TextViews one placed below the other, but I've been still getting a little bit cropped text on certain devices..
So I decided to switch to just one TextView an use Spannables instead which should be generally a better solution in all circumstances.
That means I needed to remove the single line property from my TextView -> in order to be able to wrap the line before starting the second Spannable..But there is an issue when is the text displayed at the first line actually longer than it..TextView wraps Automaticaly which is an unwanted behavior. Below you can see several screenshots, which should you better tell what I'm trying to achieve and where I'm now.
The first image shows new layout with spannables and you can see there the wrapped line as well.
The second image is the initial version of the layout woth two textviews layed out verically in a LinearLayout.
There is also a problem it's actually an appwidget, that means I do not have an access to that textview instance directly. I have been thinking about ditching textviews at all and instead use just ImageView and render all manually on canvas..That seems like an overkill to me, so I'm looking for a better solution. Unfortunately I'm kind of out of ideas and knowledge:)
Thank you

If you want to prevent a multi-word string from wrapping, you can replace the spaces with non-breaking spaces ('\u00A0'). TextView treats these as word characters, but renders them as spaces.

Wrap text in button gracefully at whitespace

I have an android application in which a user can create what is basically a macro and label that macro with some text. I then create a button for them with their descriptive text. The button is a custom view extending Button. In the constructor I set the layout as follows:
this.setLayoutParams(new LayoutParams(LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT,
LayoutParams.WRAP_CONTENT));
These buttons are then placed within a GridView. Functionally, it's working as intended but I'm running into a layout issue.
If the text is too long, it will break and wrap to the next line, thus increasing the height of the button while maintaining a constant width. The problem is in how the text wraps, it will break in the middle of a word, instead of gracefully wrapping at whitespace. For instance the test "Perform an Action" will render as
Perform an Ac
tion
Ideally, I'd like to wrap gracefully at whitespace instead of breaking words across lines. I suppose I could do this by checking the length of the text and the font against the width of the button and then doing some fancy insertion of newlines myself, but that gives me traumatic flashbacks to making win32 UIs. Is there a better way?

you can add this attribute to your Button's XML that will magically put the whole text in one line:
android:singleLine="true"
or you can verify the text before you insert it to the button and check the number of words.. if it is too long like more than 25 characters then break it on the second or third whitespace then set it to the button.
hope I got your question right.

AFAIK there's no simple way to do precisely what you want. You can get a decent look using android:singleLine="true" and android:ellipsize="marquee". Also, since you have already implemented your own Button class, take a peek at this question

I had a button which said "Off" and had a drawable to the left, but it was wrapping to two lines. i.e.
Image O
ff
The solution was that I removed the drawablePadding style. i.e.
<item name="android:drawablePadding">5dp</item>

EditText with non-selectable grayed out prefix

I'm looking for a way to have a grayed out text as prefix in an EditText. This text should be not selectable.
It's a bit like the To field when you're composing a message with Gmail. The only (visual) difference is that this text disappears when you start typing.
Is there any trick to achieve this in Android?
Thanks!

You can use an image of the part "EUR 2500". this you can display in your editbox without affecting the rest of the part. Follow the code:
Drawable editTextDrawable = context.getResources().getDrawable(imageId);
editTextDrawable.setBounds(0, 0, editTextDrawable.getIntrinsicWidth(),
editTextDrawable.getIntrinsicHeight());
The drawable can be used inside the edittext as follows:
editTxtItemName.setCompoundDrawables(,
ListViewConstants.editTextDrawable, null, null, null);

As an ultimate solution, you can rewrite the full EditText class by extending it and modifying it in a way that it has a custom Background set by you, and a predefined padding set by you.
Put the EUR as the background, positioning it in the left side, and then give the starting padding of the EditText in such a way that the text the user types, starts right after the EUR text.
This maybe regarded as an overkill or a poor-man's solution to this problem, but still its the ultimate option. Not the smartest one perhaps, and I also don't know if its gonna work for sure :P
All the best!

Is there any way to fix the amount of characters per line in an EditText without doing it programatically?

I just want to set the maximum amount of characters per line, so that the words will wrap onto the next line. Is there any way to do this? I looked over the EditText documentation and I don't see a clear way of doing this.
Any help is appreciated

You can set
android:maxWidth="200dip"
Inside your xml file for the EditText. This will make it wrap the text on to the next line once the width is reached. You'll have to play with the dip value to see how big you want it. As far as I know there is no way to measure this in characters though. You'll need to have the layout_height set to "wrap_content" also if you want the view to grow to show the text as it gets typed, if its longer than your view.

you can set maxlength property of edittext in our xml.

iphone-style text edit on android

I'm trying to make iPhone-style EditText element on android.
The one that will have an additional clear button appear on the right after text input.
Adding a new button is not a problem, but I'm a bit stuck with another thing.
A button occupies some space on the right part of EditText, and now characters display beneath the button. How to change maximum shown length of input for EditText?
I want EditText width to be N pixels, and editable area to be N-M pixels.
EditText.setWidth changes width for whole edit box.
EditText.setEllipsize should be the proper solution, but docs are empty, and as I see it truncates text based on some String value.
Applying a LengthFilter cut's the input length to number of characters.
Thanks in advance.

I suspect that android:drawableRight will save you a lot of pain.

Seems I've found a solution.
EditText.setPadding(l,t,r,b) seems to work fine, applying only for editable area

Try this : http://mytechead.wordpress.com/2012/02/07/create-ios-like-cleartextbutton-in-android/

This is a very old question, but thought I'd add my two cents for kicks. I'd probably use a 9 patch for this and set the content area to stop the text before it hits the button area.
This would require creating a custom view so that you can add a button in the desired position using relative layout so that it can be clicked to clear the edittext.
Alternatively you can use the compound drawables, but you would need to implement something like this
Handling click events on a drawable within an EditText so that you can handle the click events. Keep in mind that I doubt the button states (eg the down state) will work using this method.