How do I use InputFilter to limit characters in an

Question

I want to restrict the chars to 0-9, a-z, A-Z and spacebar only. Setting inputtype I can limit to digits but I cannot figure out the ways of Inputfilter looking through the docs.

Answer 1

This simple solution worked for me when I needed to prevent the user from entering empty strings into an EditText. You can of course add more characters:

InputFilter textFilter = new InputFilter() {

@Override

public CharSequence filter(CharSequence c, int arg1, int arg2,

    Spanned arg3, int arg4, int arg5) {

    StringBuilder sbText = new StringBuilder(c);

    String text = sbText.toString();

    if (text.contains(" ")) {    
        return "";   
    }    
    return c;   
    }   
};

private void setTextFilter(EditText editText) {

    editText.setFilters(new InputFilter[]{textFilter});

}

Answer 2

Ignoring the span stuff that other people have dealt with, to properly handle dictionary suggestions I found the following code works.

The source grows as the suggestion grows so we have to look at how many characters it's actually expecting us to replace before we return anything.

If we don't have any invalid characters, return null so that the default replacement occurs.

Otherwise we need to extract out the valid characters from the substring that's ACTUALLY going to be placed into the EditText.

InputFilter filter = new InputFilter() { 
    public CharSequence filter(CharSequence source, int start, int end, 
    Spanned dest, int dstart, int dend) { 

        boolean includesInvalidCharacter = false;
        StringBuilder stringBuilder = new StringBuilder();

        int destLength = dend - dstart + 1;
        int adjustStart = source.length() - destLength;
        for(int i=start ; i<end ; i++) {
            char sourceChar = source.charAt(i);
            if(Character.isLetterOrDigit(sourceChar)) {
                if(i >= adjustStart)
                     stringBuilder.append(sourceChar);
            } else
                includesInvalidCharacter = true;
        }
        return includesInvalidCharacter ? stringBuilder : null;
    } 
}; 

Answer 3

much easier:

<EditText
    android:inputType="text"
    android:digits="0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,*,qwertzuiopasdfghjklyxcvbnm" />

Answer 4

For some reason the android.text.LoginFilter class's constructor is package-scoped, so you can't directly extend it (even though it would be identical to this code). But you can extend LoginFilter.UsernameFilterGeneric! Then you just have this:

class ABCFilter extends LoginFilter.UsernameFilterGeneric {
    public UsernameFilter() {
        super(false); // false prevents not-allowed characters from being appended
    }

    @Override
    public boolean isAllowed(char c) {
        if ('A' <= c && c <= 'C')
            return true;
        if ('a' <= c && c <= 'c')
            return true;

        return false;
    }
}

This isn't really documented, but it's part of the core lib, and the source is straightforward. I've been using it for a while now, so far no problems, though I admit I haven't tried doing anything complex involving spannables.