Question

As the title explains, I’d like to add links to my TextView, with these two caveats:

• I want the link to act on a part of the TextView, not the full one (something like an A anchor in HTML).

• I want the link to point to an action in my code, not a website. I could define a method in my activity, or implement an OnClickListener, and execute that when that specific link is clicked.

So far, I succeeded to turn phone numbers, addresses, web sites and emails into dedicated external links using:

Linkify.addLinks(message, Linkify.ALL);

I’d like something similar for internal links (to my method), with the possibility to define custom ones.

Also, using a web page with internal link and a web view is not really an option, as I already have several complex layouts defined, and having to modify the whole application and concepts would be quite a pain…

Any idea?

EDIT: Kabuko gave me a very good solution, here is exactly how I implemented it:

final TextView descriptionTextView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.description);
final Spannable span = Spannable.Factory.getInstance().newSpannable("the full text for the view");
span.setSpan(new ClickableSpan() {
    @Override
    public void onClick(View widget) {
        Toast.makeText(StartEventActivity.this, "LINK CLICKED", Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
    }
}, 1, 20, Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE); // 1 and 20 to be replaced with actual index of start and end of the desired link
descriptionTextView.setText(span);
descriptionTextView.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getInstance());

Answer 1

If you wanted to actually go to URLs you could use Html.fromHtml, but if you want your own click handlers you can use a ClickableSpan.