Question

I’m struggling with using EditText and Spannable text object, These days, I’ve read API documents around ten times, even I’m not certain that I understand correctly. So I’m looking for a kind of example which show me how to utilize EditText and Spannable.

Answer 1

Since you don’t specify what you can’t grasp from the API it’s hard to answer your questions (short answer: rewrite your question to a specific questions rather than a general one).

A typical Spannable-example is something like this to turn selected text in an EditText into Italic:

Spannable str = mBodyText.getText(); 
if(mBodyText.getSelectionEnd() > mBodyText.getSelectionStart()) 
  str.setSpan(new StyleSpan(android.graphics.Typeface.ITALIC),  
                      mBodyText.getSelectionStart(), mBodyText.getSelectionEnd(),  
                      Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
else
  str.setSpan(new StyleSpan(android.graphics.Typeface.ITALIC),
              mBodyText.getSelectionEnd(),
              mBodyText.getSelectionStart(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);

This is cut and pasted from something else, so your direct-pastability might have suffered, but it at least shows a working example of a Spannable (in this case a StyleSpan). In the API you can find the other types of Spans (notably ImageSpan, which is a common questions among newly converted droiders).