EditText in multi-color

Question

I am working on an Android application.

Now I want take input from user into an EditText. I want display the text after the last fullstop in black color and text before last full stop in red color.

For example, If user types below sentence in EditText:

'my name is john.I am from India.I Love Android'

I want to show the 'I love Android ' in black and first parts of the sentence in red.

Is there any way to do that?

Answer 1

Use SpannableString to apply attributes to your text. Here blog entry you may want to read: http://www.chrisumbel.com/article/android_textview_rich_text_spannablestring .

Answer 2

Listen to changes in text by:

    editText.addTextChangedListener(new TextWatcher() { 
        public void afterTextChanged(Editable s) { 
            if (!colorHasSet) {
                makeColorText();
            }
            colorHasSet = false;
        }
        public void beforeTextChanged(CharSequence arg0, int arg1, int arg2, int arg3) {}
        public void onTextChanged(CharSequence arg0, int arg1, int arg2, int arg3) {}
    });   

then declare a function to colorize text by using the tutorial which WebnetMobile linked to.

public void makeColorText() {
     SpannableString ss = new SpannableString(textEdit.getText());
    // customize ss here
    // ...
    colorHasSet = true;
    editText.setText(ss);
}

flag boolean variable colorHasSet should be defined to prevent stackOverflowException.

this is not a complete WYSIWYG editor with instant colored text, and you should do some hacks to make it complete and suitable to your needs, that is left to be done by yourself.