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I am developing an application in which there will be a search screen where user can search for specific keywords and that keyword should be highlighted. I have found Html.fromHtml method.

But I will like to know whether its the proper way of doing it or not.

Please let me know your views on this.

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check out for an working example. javatechig.com/2013/04/07/how-to-display-html-in-android-view – Nilanchala Apr 7 at 20:29

4 Answers

up vote 62 down vote accepted

Or far simpler than dealing with Spannables manually, since you didn't say that you want the background highlighted, just the text:

String styledText = "This is <font color='red'>simple</font>.";
textView.setText(Html.fromHtml(styledText), TextView.BufferType.SPANNABLE);
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It's worth noting, that Html.fromHtml is slower than SpannableString, because it involves parsing. But for a short text it doesn't matter – Michał K Dec 8 '12 at 19:01
There appears to be another solution at link. See the answer by Legend. – Kenneth Evans Jan 15 at 22:25
up vote 8 down vote

This can be achieved using a Spannable String. You will need to import the following

import android.text.SpannableString; 
import android.text.style.BackgroundColorSpan; 
import android.text.style.StyleSpan;

And then you can change the background of the text using something like the following:

TextView text = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.text_login);
text.setText("");
text.append("Add all your funky text in here");
Spannable sText = (Spannable) text.getText();
sText.setSpan(new BackgroundColorSpan(Color.RED), 1, 4, 0);

Where this will highlight the charecters at pos 1 - 4 with a red color. Hope this helps!

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Thanks a lot for replying. – sunil May 31 '10 at 14:11
up vote 3 down vote

Alternative solution: Using a WebView instead. Html is easy to work with.

WebView webview = new WebView(this);

String summary = "<html><body>Sorry, <span style=\"background: red;\">Madonna</span> gave no results</body></html>";

webview.loadData(summary, "text/html", "utf-8");
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Thanks a lot for replying and letting me know the use of Webview and HTML. – sunil May 31 '10 at 14:27
up vote 1 down vote

Using color value from xml resource:

int сolor = getResources().getColor(R.color.label_color);
String сolorString = String.format("%X", labelColor).substring(2); // !!strip alpha value!!

Html.fromHtml(String.format("<font color=\"#%s\">text</font>", сolorString), TextView.BufferType.SPANNABLE);
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nicely done. useful to be able to use colors from your apps resources. – domji84 May 7 at 11:37

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