How do you do a backspace escape character in Android?

Question

I have a textView with some text in it. I want to delete the last 4 characters and then add on some more text. I tried doing this.

textViewObject.append("\b\b\b\b new text that I am adding");

But instead of the \\b doing a backspace, they show up as little squares in the textfield. Can anyone help me out here?

Answer 1

You should be able to achieve the same effect by grabbing all the text except the last 4 characters and then appending your new text.

String textViewText = textViewObject.getText().toString();
textViewObject.setText(textViewText.substring(0, textViewText.getLength() - 4) + 
                                                   " new text that I am adding");