Question

Is there any way to map characters to a pixel location in an EditText?

I assume there is some knowledge within the component of the word at any pixel location, because you can select a word for copy and paste operations.

Also, most of the popular browsers and book readers have some sort of lookup function where you can select a word and look it up on the web or in a dictionary. How do these apps know the word that was tapped or selected?

I can’t think of a good strategy for accomplishing this, beyond re-writing EditText and capturing all of the entered text as they are rendered in the onDraw() method.

I am sure there must be a much better strategy than that! Any ideas?

Answer 1

Try this:

   String selectedText = et.getText().substring(startSelection, endSelection);

It’s just a basic Java String operation.