Question

I’ve been trying to figure this one out for a bit using patterns or other utils but haven’t gotten it to work just yet.

Say I have an HTML link:

 <a href="http://www.google.com">Google, Inc.</a>

I want to make a link into a text view BUT set the text of the link as the actual URL not Google, Inc.

So for example if the data I received is:

–Hey if you want to try a search go to <a href="http://www.google.com">Google, Inc.</a> and it’s easy as that.

I want it to display as:

–Hey if you want to try a search go to http://www.google.com and it’s easy as that.

Instead of:

–Hey if you want to try a search go to Google, Inc. and it’s easy as that.

Html.fromHtml() makes it show as “Google, Inc.” automatically, but isn’t the result that I want.

Also, I don’t need this to work for specifically this example, I need it to work for all html links as I don’t know what links I will get as data.

Answer 1

I suggest using Linkify and parsing the Strings yourself to create the links you want.

Set Linkify to look for raw web addresses and turn them into links in your text:

<TextView
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:autoLink="web"
    />

This function will pull the raw address out the html tags:

public String parseLinks(String raw) {
    String openTag = "<a href=\"";
    String closeTag = "</a>";
    String result = "";

    int start = 0;
    int middle = raw.indexOf(openTag);
    int end;
    while(middle > -1) {
        result += raw.substring(start, middle);

        end = raw.indexOf("\">", middle);
        result += raw.substring(middle + openTag.length(), end);

        start = raw.indexOf(closeTag, end) + closeTag.length(); 
        middle = raw.indexOf(openTag, start);
    }

    result += raw.substring(start, raw.length());
    return result;
}

Understand that this function does no error checking, I recommend adding this yourself.

Now simply pass the String returned from parseLinks() to your TextView, like this:

textView.setText(parseLinks(rawHTML));

Hope that helps!