Multiline TextView with width “wrap_content”

Question

I am wondering how to have a TextView display its content on several lines without hardcoding the width in the XML .

    <LinearLayout
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:gravity="right"
        android:orientation="horizontal">

        <TextView
            android:layout_width="wrap_content"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"
            android:singleLine="false"
            android:text="Long multiline text"/>

        <TextView
            android:textColor="@color/text_color"
            android:layout_width="130dp"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"
            />

    </LinearLayout>

Any thought welcome.

EDIT : my problem is that when the text exceeds the width set (because it reaches the end of the screen) a portion of the text is just not displayed. I would expect the text to be split on two lines

Answer 1

Though I cannot reproduce the not wrapping problem, you can fix the positioning problem by using a weight on the first TextView . Using the following XML gives the expected output in the graphical layout view in Eclipse:

<LinearLayout
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:gravity="right"
    android:orientation="horizontal">

    <TextView
        android:layout_width="0dp"
        android:layout_weight="1"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:singleLine="false"
        android:text="Long multiline text"/>

    <TextView
        android:textColor="@color/text_color"
        android:layout_width="130dp"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        />

</LinearLayout>

Answer 2

Also add

android:minLines="2"
android:scrollHorizontally="false"

Answer 3

You could try

android:inputType="textMultiLine"

in your TextView XML. This worked for me.

Answer 4

I think I had very similar problem. I had a TextView with a text, where I was not sure how much lines will it take. It was encapsulated by a LinearLayout having android:layout_width="match_parent" to ensure my text will fill out all the space horizontally. However, the problem was that my text did not fit into 1 line and when it did break into a new line, the next view component below it did not move downwards to give enough space for the second line to be viewable fully.

I could achieve the solution by changing the LinearLayout that was containing my TextView into a RelativeLayout . By this way, the element below the text (actually below the Layout itself) was moved automatically to give enough space for the multi-line text.