Question

I am a bit confused about the ‘rules’ of when a TextView element displays text in formatted form or not.

A string like

"There are <i>different ways</i> of coding.\n";

displays without any formatting (including the HTML codes) when I code

tvMyTextView.setText("There are <i>different ways</i> of coding.\n");

but when I define the same string in strings.xml and then load

tvMyTextView.setText(R.strings.TestString);

it displays emphasized.

Even more confused I feel when trying to embed URLs in TextView’s like here:

"Click <a href="http://www.poon-world.com">here</a> to switch on the red light.\n";

Needless to say I already tried the various property options of TextView – but they don’t seem to make much of a difference unless I missed something. In some cases the URL is encoded in the text, in blue color and can be clicked, in others I can see the HTML formatting. In others again, it is color-encoded and the URL seems to be encoded in the text somehow – but nothing happens when I click it. Regarding the embedding of URLs, unlike for the other example with ‘simple’ HTML formatting, I couldn’t even find out a rule so far of when it works and when it doesn’t. Can anyone help me to untie the knots in my head..

Answer 1

Actually, From the Android Docs..

public final void setText (CharSequence text)

Sets the string value of the TextView. TextView does not accept HTML-like formatting, which you can do with text strings in XML resource files. To style your strings, attach android.text.style.* objects to a SpannableString, or see the Available Resource Types documentation for an example of setting formatted text in the XML resource file.

But,

public final void setText (int resid)

• no more specification on it..

But from Android Resource String docs..

You can add styling to your strings with HTML markup. For example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <string name="welcome">Welcome to <b>Android</b>!</string>
</resources>

Supported HTML elements include:

<b> for bold text.
<i> for italic text.
<u> for underline text.

Sometimes you may want to create a styled text resource that is also used as a format string. 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.

And about your URL string,…

tvMyTextView.setText(Html.fromHtml("Click <a href="http://www.poon-world.com">here</a> to switch on the red light.\n"));

Also look at this SO Question Set TextView text from html-formatted string resource in XML

and

Android String Resource