(Android) Changing text color in strings.xml

Question

First, depending on the user's actions, I want to retrieve a certain strings from my strings.xml resource file:

String option1 = context.getString(R.string.string_one)
String option2 = context.getString(R.string.string_two)
String option3 = context.getString(R.string.string_three)

Then, I pass these strings as String[] options to a custom adapter for a ListView where I set the text of a TextView

    public ChoicesAdapter(Context context, String[] options) {
         super(context, R.layout.choice_option_layout_2,choices);
    }



 @Override
    public View getView(int position, View convertView, ViewGroup parent) {
        LayoutInflater MyInflater = LayoutInflater.from(getContext());
        View MyView = MyInflater.inflate(R.layout.option_list_layout, parent, false);

        String option = getItem(position);
        TextView textView = (TextView) MyView.findViewById(R.id.textView);

        textView.setText(Html.fromHtml(option));

        return MyView;
    }

I want different strings in my strings.xml file to have different colors or different formatting. For example, here is one of my strings:

 <string name ="exit"><![CDATA[<i>exit</i>]]></string>

However, when this string is displayed on the screen, it shows as: "<i>exit</i>"

So, I'm guessing somewhere in my method I am losing the string.xml resource's formatting. How can I get it so instead of showing "<i>exit</i>" , it will show " exit " on the screen?

I am thinking my problem is where i use .getString() . Is this somehow ignoring the formatting that I added to it in the .xml file?

Answer 1

Check out http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/string-resource.html#FormattingAndStyling - their example is:

<string name="welcome">Welcome to <b>Android</b>!</string>

It says you can use <b>text</b> for bold text, <i>text</i> for italic text, and <u>text</u> for underlined text.

The important part of this is, "Normally, this won't work because the String.format(String, Object...) method will strip all the style information from the string. The work-around to this is to write the HTML tags with escaped entities, which are then recovered with fromHtml(String) , after the formatting takes place."

They say to "store your styled text resource as an HTML-escaped string" like

 <string name="exit">&lt;i>exit&lt;/i></string>

and then use:

Resources res = getResources();
String text = String.format(res.getString(R.string.exit));
CharSequence styledText = Html.fromHtml(text);

to get the formatted text correctly.

Answer 2

Did you just try to read your String into Spannable?

// Use a spannable to keep formatting
Spannable mySpannable = Html.fromHtml(context.getString(R.string.string_one));
textView.setText(mySpannable);