Android - Highlight a Word In a TextView?

Question

I have a database search query which search in the database for a word entered by the user and return a Cursor.

In my ListActivity, I have a ListView which will hold the items (the Cursor items). The ListView items layout is basically a TextView. I mean, the ListView will be a list of TextView's.

What I want is to highlight the search term wherever it appears in the TextView. I mean by highlighting: different color or different background color or anything makes it different than the rest of the text.

Is this possible? and how?

Update:

cursor = myDbHelper.search(term);  //term: a word entered by the user.
cursor.moveToFirst();
String[] columns = {cursor.getColumnName(1)}; 
int[] columnsLayouts = {R.id.item_title}; //item_title: the TextView holding the one raw
ca = new SimpleCursorAdapter(this.getBaseContext(), R.layout.items_layout, cursor,columns , columnsLayouts);
lv = getListView();
lv.setAdapter(ca);

For @Shailendra: The search() method will return some titles. I want to highlight the words in those titles that matches the term word. I hope this is clear now.

Answer 1

You do so in xml strings if your strings are static

<string name="my_text">This text is <font color='red'>red here</font></string>

Answer 2

Try this library Android TextHighlighter.

Implementations

TextView.setText() gets a parameter as Spannable not only CharacterSequence. SpannableString has a method setSpan() which allows applying styles.

See list of direct subclass form CharacterStyle https://developer.android.com/reference/android/text/style/CharacterStyle.html

• example of giving background color and foreground color for word "Hello" in "Hello, World"

Spannable spannable = new SpannableString("Hello, World");
// setting red foreground color
ForegroundSpan fgSpan = new ForegroundColorSpan(Color.red);
// setting blue background color
BackgroundSpan bgSpan = new BackgroundColorSPan(Color.blue);

// setSpan requires start and end index
// in our case, it's 0 and 5
// You can directly set fgSpan or bgSpan, however,
// to reuse defined CharacterStyle, use CharacterStyle.wrap()
spannable.setSpan(CharacterStyle.wrap(fgSpan), 0, 5, 0);
spannable.setSpan(CharacterStyle.wrap(bgSpan), 0, 5, 0);

// apply spannableString on textview
textView.setText(spannable);

Answer 3

I haven't done it but this looks promising:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/text/SpannableString.html
http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/string-resource.html

public final void setText (CharSequence text)

Since: API Level 1 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.

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/widget/TextView.html

Answer 4

More Easy Way

You can use Spannable class for highlighting/formatting part of Text.

textView.setText("Hello, I am Awesome, Most Awesome"); // set text first
setHighLightedText(textView, "a"); // highlight all `a` in TextView

Here is the method.

 /**
     * use this method to highlight a text in TextView
     *
     * @param tv              TextView or Edittext or Button (or derived from TextView)
     * @param textToHighlight Text to highlight
     */
    public void setHighLightedText(TextView tv, String textToHighlight) {
        String tvt = tv.getText().toString();
        int ofe = tvt.indexOf(textToHighlight, 0);
        Spannable wordToSpan = new SpannableString(tv.getText());
        for (int ofs = 0; ofs < tvt.length() && ofe != -1; ofs = ofe + 1) {
            ofe = tvt.indexOf(textToHighlight, ofs);
            if (ofe == -1)
                break;
            else {
                // set color here
                wordToSpan.setSpan(new BackgroundColorSpan(0xFFFFFF00), ofe, ofe + textToHighlight.length(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
                tv.setText(wordToSpan, TextView.BufferType.SPANNABLE);
            }
        }
    }

You can check this answer for clickable highlighted text.

Answer 5

insert HTML code for color around word and set it to your textView .

like

String newString = oldString.replaceAll(textToHighlight, "<font color='red'>"+textToHighlight+"</font>");
textView.setText(Html.fromHtml(newString));

Answer 6

I know it's old question but i have created a method to highlight a repeated-word in string\paragraph.

private Spannable highlight(int color, Spannable original, String word) {
    String normalized = Normalizer.normalize(original, Normalizer.Form.NFD)
            .replaceAll("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+", "");

    int start = normalized.indexOf(word);
    if (start < 0) {
        return original;
    } else {
        Spannable highlighted = new SpannableString(original);
        while (start >= 0) {
            int spanStart = Math.min(start, original.length());
            int spanEnd = Math.min(start+word.length(), original.length());

            highlighted.setSpan(new ForegroundColorSpan(color), spanStart,
                    spanEnd, Spanned.SPAN_INCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);

            start = normalizedText.indexOf(word, spanEnd);
        }
        return highlighted;
    }
}

usage:

textView.setText(highlight(primaryColor, textAll, wordToHighlight));