What's the best way to limit text length of EditText in Android

Question

What\'s the best way to limit the text length of an EditText in Android?

Is there a way to do this via xml?

Answer 1

I had saw a lot of good solutions, but I'd like to give a what I think as more complete and user-friendly solution, which include:

1, Limit length.
2, If input more, give a callback to trigger your toast.
3, Cursor can be at middle or tail.
4, User can input by paste a string.
5, Always discard overflow input and keep origin.

public class LimitTextWatcher implements TextWatcher {

    public interface IF_callback{
        void callback(int left);
    }

    public IF_callback if_callback;

    EditText editText;
    int maxLength;

    int cursorPositionLast;
    String textLast;
    boolean bypass;

    public LimitTextWatcher(EditText editText, int maxLength, IF_callback if_callback) {

        this.editText = editText;
        this.maxLength = maxLength;
        this.if_callback = if_callback;
    }

    @Override
    public void beforeTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start, int count, int after) {

        if (bypass) {

            bypass = false;

        } else {

            StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();
            stringBuilder.append(s);
            textLast = stringBuilder.toString();

            this.cursorPositionLast = editText.getSelectionStart();
        }
    }

    @Override
    public void onTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start, int before, int count) {

    }

    @Override
    public void afterTextChanged(Editable s) {
        if (s.toString().length() > maxLength) {

            int left = maxLength - s.toString().length();

            bypass = true;
            s.clear();

            bypass = true;
            s.append(textLast);

            editText.setSelection(this.cursorPositionLast);

            if (if_callback != null) {
                if_callback.callback(left);
            }
        }

    }

}


edit_text.addTextChangedListener(new LimitTextWatcher(edit_text, MAX_LENGTH, new LimitTextWatcher.IF_callback() {
    @Override
    public void callback(int left) {
        if(left <= 0) {
            Toast.makeText(MainActivity.this, "input is full", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
        }
    }
}));

What I failed to do is, if user highlight a part of the current input and try to paste an very long string, I don't know how to restore the highlight.

Such as, max length is set to 10, user inputed '12345678', and mark '345' as highlight, and try to paste a string of '0000' which will exceed limitation.

When I try to use edit_text.setSelection(start=2, end=4) to restore origin status, the result is, it just insert 2 space as '12 345 678', not the origin highlight. I'd like someone solve that.