Question

How to implement selecting text capability on Android 2.2? I searched Google but can’t find a solution.

Answer 1

This is the only way I’ve found (from google) to support it for android 1.6+, it works but it’s not ideal, I think in stock android you can’t hold down a webview to highlight until v2.3, but I may be mistaken..

By the way this is for a webview, it might also work on textview, but I haven’t tried it

(Note: this is currently what my shipped app is using, so it works with all the phones I’ve had it tested on, but the only reason I found this question was because I was searching and hoping that someone had come up with a better way by now)

I’ve just got a menu item called “Select text” which calls the function “selectnCopy()”

@Override
public boolean onOptionsItemSelected(MenuItem item) {
    //..
    switch (item.getItemId()) {
        case R.id.menu_select:
            selectnCopy();
            return true;
    //..
    }
}

Which looks like this:

public void selectnCopy() {
    Toast.makeText(WebClass.this,getString(R.string.select_help),Toast.LENGTH_SHORT).show();
    try {
        KeyEvent shiftPressEvent = new KeyEvent(0, 0, KeyEvent.ACTION_DOWN,
                KeyEvent.KEYCODE_SHIFT_LEFT, 0, 0);
        shiftPressEvent.dispatch(wv);
    } catch (Exception e) {
        throw new AssertionError(e);
    }
}

Notice I’ve put the select_help string there as a toast, that’s just because it’s not immediately clear to the user how it’s supposed to work

<string name="select_help">Touch and drag to copy text.</string>