Android - Highlight a Word In a TextView?

Question

I have a database search query which search in the database for a word entered by the user and return a Cursor.

In my ListActivity

Answer 1

More Easy Way

You can use Spannable class for highlighting/formatting part of Text.

textView.setText("Hello, I am Awesome, Most Awesome"); // set text first
setHighLightedText(textView, "a"); // highlight all `a` in TextView

Here is the method.

 /**
     * use this method to highlight a text in TextView
     *
     * @param tv              TextView or Edittext or Button (or derived from TextView)
     * @param textToHighlight Text to highlight
     */
    public void setHighLightedText(TextView tv, String textToHighlight) {
        String tvt = tv.getText().toString();
        int ofe = tvt.indexOf(textToHighlight, 0);
        Spannable wordToSpan = new SpannableString(tv.getText());
        for (int ofs = 0; ofs < tvt.length() && ofe != -1; ofs = ofe + 1) {
            ofe = tvt.indexOf(textToHighlight, ofs);
            if (ofe == -1)
                break;
            else {
                // set color here
                wordToSpan.setSpan(new BackgroundColorSpan(0xFFFFFF00), ofe, ofe + textToHighlight.length(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
                tv.setText(wordToSpan, TextView.BufferType.SPANNABLE);
            }
        }
    }

You can check this answer for clickable highlighted text.