Android Edittext- Clearing Spans

Question

I am trying to get an EditText to clear its spans by calling EditText.getText().clearSpans(). However, if I call this method, the EditText starts to behave strangely, with line feeds appearing as boxes and any spans I then set being in completely the wrong place.

So my question is: How do I clear spans from and EditText? (Without calling setText()- the text may be thousands of lines long and its too slow to redraw it all frequently)

Thanks very much!

Answer 1

Had the same problem. Solved it by removing only the types of spans that I added to the EditText. I guess clearSpans removes more than it should. I did something like this for each type of span I used:

toRemoveSpans = et.getSpans(0, et.getText().length(), ForegroundColorSpan.class);
for (int i = 0; i < toRemoveSpans.length; i++) 
    et.removeSpan(toRemoveSpans[i]);

Answer 2

private void clearSpans(@NonNull final Editable editable) {
    final Object[] spans = editable.getSpans(0, editable.length(), Object.class);
    for (final Object span : spans) {
        if (span instanceof ForegroundColorSpan || span instanceof SpannableTextView.CustomTypefaceSpan) {
            editable.removeSpan(span);
        }
    }
}

Depending on type of spans you have added you may have to include more than just ForegroundColorSpan. The above method is a simple drop in replacement and it easy to specify what spans to remove.

Answer 3

the best answer would be this which "s" is the string that you want to show instead of spans or it can be empty String.

the code is in Kotlin

editText.setText(s)
editText.setSelection(editText.text.length)