How to display HTML in TextView?

Question

I have simple HTML:

<h2>Title</h2><br>
<p>description here</p>

I want to display HTML styled text it in TextView. How to do this?

Answer 1

You need to use Html.fromHtml() to use HTML in your XML Strings. Simply referencing a String with HTML in your layout XML will not work.

This is what you should do:

if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.N) {
    textView.setText(Html.fromHtml("<h2>Title</h2><br><p>Description here</p>", Html.FROM_HTML_MODE_COMPACT));
} else { 
    textView.setText(Html.fromHtml("<h2>Title</h2><br><p>Description here</p>"));
}

Answer 2

If you are trying to show HTML from a string resource id, the formatting may not show up on screen. If that is happening to you, try using CDATA tags instead:

strings.xml:
<string name="sample_string"><![CDATA[<h2>Title</h2><br><p>Description here</p>]]></string>

...

MainActivity.java:
text.setText(Html.fromHtml(getString(R.string.sample_string));

See this post for further details.

Answer 3

I have implemented this using web view. In my case i have to load image from URL along with the text in text view and this works for me.

WebView myWebView =new WebView(_context);
        String html = childText;
        String mime = "text/html";
        String encoding = "utf-8";
        myWebView.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
        myWebView.loadDataWithBaseURL(null, html, mime, encoding, null);

Answer 4

String value = html value ....
mTextView.setText(Html.fromHtml(value),TextView.BufferType.SPANNABLE)

Answer 5

If you want to be able to configure it through xml without any modification in java code you may find this idea helpful. Simply you call init from constructor and set the text as html

public class HTMLTextView extends TextView {
    ... constructors calling init...
    private void init(){
       setText(Html.fromHtml(getText().toString()));
    }    
}

xml:

        <com.package.HTMLTextView
        android:text="@string/about_item_1"/>

Answer 6

Simple use Html.fromHtml("html string"). This will work. If the string has tags like <h1> then spaces will come. But we cannot eliminate those spaces. If you still want to remove the spaces, then you can remove the tags in the string and then pass the string to the method Html.fromHtml("html string"); . Also generally these strings come from server(dynamic) but not often, if it is the case better to pass the string as it is to the method than try to remove the tags from the string.