HTML formatting for TextView

Question

I am a bit confused about the 'rules' of when a TextView element displays text in formatted form or not.

A string like

"There are <i>different ways</i> of coding.\n";

displays without any formatting (including the HTML codes) when I code

tvMyTextView.setText("There are <i>different ways</i> of coding.\n");

but when I define the same string in strings.xml and then load

tvMyTextView.setText(R.strings.TestString);

it displays emphasized.

Even more confused I feel when trying to embed URLs in TextView's like here:

"Click <a href="http://www.poon-world.com">here</a> to switch on the red light.\n";

Needless to say I already tried the various property options of TextView - but they don't seem to make much of a difference unless I missed something. In some cases the URL is encoded in the text, in blue color and can be clicked, in others I can see the HTML formatting. In others again, it is color-encoded and the URL seems to be encoded in the text somehow - but nothing happens when I click it. Regarding the embedding of URLs, unlike for the other example with 'simple' HTML formatting, I couldn't even find out a rule so far of when it works and when it doesn't. Can anyone help me to untie the knots in my head..

Answer 1

Actually, From the Android Docs..

public final void setText (CharSequence text)

Sets the string value of the TextView. TextView does not accept HTML-like formatting, which you can do with text strings in XML resource files. To style your strings, attach android.text.style.* objects to a SpannableString, or see the Available Resource Types documentation for an example of setting formatted text in the XML resource file.

But,

public final void setText (int resid)

• no more specification on it..

But from Android Resource String docs..

You can add styling to your strings with HTML markup. For example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <string name="welcome">Welcome to <b>Android</b>!</string>
</resources>

Supported HTML elements include:

<b> for bold text.
<i> for italic text.
<u> for underline text.

Sometimes you may want to create a styled text resource that is also used as a format string. Normally, this won't work because the String.format(String, Object...) method will strip all the style information from the string. The work-around to this is to write the HTML tags with escaped entities, which are then recovered with fromHtml(String), after the formatting takes place.

And about your URL string,...

tvMyTextView.setText(Html.fromHtml("Click <a href="http://www.poon-world.com">here</a> to switch on the red light.\n"));

Also look at this SO Question Set TextView text from html-formatted string resource in XML

and

Android String Resource

Answer 2

tvMyTextView.setText(Html.fromHtml("There are <i>different ways</i> of coding.\n"));

also try

Below link For linkify so automatically website link assign.

http://developer.android.com/resources/articles/wikinotes-linkify.html

Answer 3

To add a few notes to my own questions and after having received the answers so far, I can only conclude that there doesn't seem to be a reliable way that works everywhere.

In some cases - according to my experience, if a formatted URL is part of the plain text and not enclosed by tags (like http://www.poon-world.com , even just " Poon-World.com " seems to work in most cases), simply setting the properties of the TextView seems to be enough and the links will be clickable. However, if links are embedded in HTML tags and supposed to be clickable from some link text, there seems to be no other way than to go with Html.fromHtml(..).

But there are also a few special cases I can't explain: in some activities/layouts, I am using "embedded" URLs and have set the Click-properties mentioned before, don't use Html.fromHtml .. and surprise!, a click on the indeed created links in the text indeed opens the browser, but only after having added the following line in the code in the OnCreate-Event:

myTextView.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getInstance());

(I found this trick in another thread, thanks to the author) No idea why, it seems to be the way the string resources are parsed and evaluated by Android. I just mentioned that on top of all that's already been said so that everyone else looking for solutions and gets confused doesn't start to think he's starting to lose his mind - no, just test the approaches mentioned here on this page and one should usually work out.