Android: How to wrap text by chars? (Not by words)

Question

For instance:

This is foo text for wrapping text in TextView

The way that TextView wraps is:

This is foo text for
wrapping text in ...

I want this:

This is foo text for wr
apping text in TextView

Answer 1

It's a bit hacky, but you could replace spaces with the unicode no-break space character (U+00A0). This will cause your text to be treated as a single string and wrap on characters instead of words.

myString.replace(" ", "\u00A0");

Answer 2

As I know, there is no such property for TextView. If you want to implement text wrapping by yourself, you can override TextView and use Paint's breakText(String text, boolean measureForwards, float maxWidth, float[] measuredWidth) function. Note that you have to specify text size, typeface etc to Paint instance.

Answer 3

Add an invisible zero-width space ('\u200b') after each character:

textView.setText(longlongText.replaceAll(".(?!$)", "$0\u200b"));

This works also for long strings containing no spaces (for example, link addresses). Standard TextView tries to break a link by question mark '?' and slash '/'.

Answer 4

public class CharacterWrapTextView extends TextView {
  public CharacterWrapTextView(Context context) {
    super(context);
  }

  public CharacterWrapTextView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
    super(context, attrs);
  }

  public CharacterWrapTextView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyleAttr) {
    super(context, attrs, defStyleAttr);
  }

  @Override public void setText(CharSequence text, BufferType type) {
    super.setText(text.toString().replace(" ", "\u00A0"), type);
  }
}

---

<com.my.CharacterWrapTextView
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:text="text"/>

---

(yellow background: normal textview)

Answer 5

The following extension method implements @atarasenko's solution in C# which may be useful for people working with Xamarin.Android. The resultant string will wrap within a TextView character-by-character.

/// <summary>
/// Add zero-width spaces after each character. This is useful when breaking text by
/// character rather than word within a TextView.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="value">String to add zero-width spaces to.</param>
/// <returns>A new string instance containing zero-width spaces.</returns>
public static string AddZeroWidthSpaces(this string value) => Regex.Replace(
    value
    , "."
    , "$0\u200b"
);