Android, How to limit width of TextView (and add three dots at the end of text)?

Question

I have a TextView that I want to limit characters of it. Actually, I can do this but the thing that I\'m looking for is how to add three dots (...) at the end o

Answer 1

The following is what I learned by playing around with various options for forcing a TextView to a single line (with and without the three dots).

android:maxLines="1"

This just forces the text to one line. Any extra text is hidden.

Related:

• android:maxLines
• android:singleLine (Note this and this)
• android:lines

ellipsize="end"

This cuts off the text that doesn't fit but lets users know that the text has been truncated by adding an ellipsis (the three dots).

Related:

• ellipsize="start" (...aaabbbccc)
• ellipsize="middle" (aaa...ccc)
• android: Ellipsise , meaning of the options

ellipsize="marquee"

This makes the text scroll automatically across the TextView. Note that sometimes it needs to be set in code:

textView.setSelected(true);

Supposedly android:maxLines="1" and android:singleLine="true" should do basically the same thing and since singleLine is apparently deprecated I would prefer not to use it, but when I take it out, the marquee doesn't scroll anymore. Taking maxLines out doesn't affect it, though.

Related:

• Marquee text in Android

HorizontalScrollView with scrollHorizontally

This allows the user to manually scroll to see the whole line of text.