How to use custom ellipsis in Android TextView

Question

I have a TextView with maxlines=3 and I would like to use my own ellipsis, instead of

\"Lore ipsum ...\"

I need

\"Lore ips         


        

Answer 1

Here's a nice way to do it with a Kotlin extension. Note that we need to wait for the view to layout before we can measure and append the suffix.

In TextViewExtensions.kt

fun TextView.setEllipsizedSuffix(maxLines: Int, suffix: String) {
    addOnLayoutChangeListener(object: View.OnLayoutChangeListener {
        override fun onLayoutChange(v: View?, left: Int, top: Int, right: Int, bottom: Int, oldLeft: Int, oldTop: Int, oldRight: Int, oldBottom:     Int) {

            val allText = text.toString()
            var newText = allText
            val tvWidth = width
            val textSize = textSize

            if(!TextUtil.textHasEllipsized(newText, tvWidth, textSize, maxLines)) return

            while (TextUtil.textHasEllipsized(newText, tvWidth, textSize, maxLines)) {
                newText = newText.substring(0, newText.length - 1).trim()
            }

            //now replace the last few chars with the suffix if we can
            val endIndex = newText.length - suffix.length - 1 //minus 1 just to make sure we have enough room
            if(endIndex > 0) {
                newText = "${newText.substring(0, endIndex).trim()}$suffix"
            }

            text = newText

            removeOnLayoutChangeListener(this)
        }
    })
}

In TextUtil.kt

fun textHasEllipsized(text: String, tvWidth: Int, textSize: Float, maxLines: Int): Boolean {
    val paint = Paint()
    paint.textSize = textSize
    val size = paint.measureText(text).toInt()

    return size > tvWidth * maxLines
}

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Then actually using it like this myTextView.setEllipsizedSuffix(2, "...See more")

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Note: if your text comes from a server and may have new line characters, then you can use this method to determine if the text has ellipsized.

fun textHasEllipsized(text: String, tvWidth: Int, textSize: Float, maxLines: Int): Boolean {
    val paint = Paint()
    paint.textSize = textSize
    val size = paint.measureText(text).toInt()
    val newLineChars = StringUtils.countMatches(text, "\n")

    return size > tvWidth * maxLines || newLineChars >= maxLines
}

StringUtils is from implementation 'org.apache.commons:commons-lang3:3.4'