Question

I have a database that will store an HTML tagged text to retain formatting information from an EditText. I create this string using HTML.toHtml(EditText.getText). I notice this method wraps whatever Spanned Text is put in it with <p> and </p>. The issue with that is when I got to use the method HTML.fromHtml(HTMLFormattedString) and then use the setText method of either a TextView or EditText there are two extra lines at the end of my actual text, which makes sense because that is how the paragraph tag works with HTML.

Is there any way to make the textView or EditText shrink to not display the extra blank lines? What is the simplest way to do this? I have experimented with just removing the last <p> and </p>, but that only works if the user did not enter 3 or more new lines with the return key.

Answer 1

I ended up searching for white space at the end of the spanned text that was created and removed it. This took care of extra spaces due to the <p> </p> and was less time consuming than overriding the mentioned class to achieve the same results.

public SpannableStringBuilder trimTrailingWhitespace(
        SpannableStringBuilder spannableString) {

    if (spannableString == null)
        return new SpannableStringBuilder("");

    int i = spannableString.length();

    // loop back to the first non-whitespace character
    while (--i >= 0 && Character.isWhitespace(spannableString.charAt(i))) {
    }

    return new SpannableStringBuilder(spannableString.subSequence(0, i + 1));
}