Can I underline text in an Android layout?

android android-layout fonts

620,127

Solution 1

It can be achieved if you are using a string resource xml file, which supports HTML tags like ,  and .

<resources>
    <string name="your_string_here"><![CDATA[This is an <u>underline</u>.]]></string>
</resources>

If you want to underline something from code use:

TextView textView = (TextView) view.findViewById(R.id.textview);
SpannableString content = new SpannableString("Content");
content.setSpan(new UnderlineSpan(), 0, content.length(), 0);
textView.setText(content);

Solution 2

You can try with

textview.setPaintFlags(textview.getPaintFlags() |   Paint.UNDERLINE_TEXT_FLAG);

Solution 3

The "accepted" answer above does NOT work (when you try to use the string like textView.setText(Html.fromHtml(String.format(getString(...), ...))).

As stated in the documentations you must escape (html entity encoded) opening bracket of the inner tags with <, e.g. result should look like:

<resource>
    <string name="your_string_here">This is an &lt;u&gt;underline&lt;/u&gt;.</string>
</resources>

Then in your code you can set the text with:

TextView textView = (TextView) view.findViewById(R.id.textview);
textView.setText(Html.fromHtml(String.format(getString(R.string.my_string), ...)));

Solution 4

Strings.xml file content:

<resource>
     <string name="my_text">This is an <u>underline</u>.</string> 
</resources>

Layout xml file shold use the above string resource with below properties of textview, as shown below:

<TextView 
    android:layout_width="fill_parent"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:gravity="center_horizontal"
    android:text="@string/my_text"

    android:selectAllOnFocus="false"
    android:linksClickable="false"
    android:autoLink="all"
    />

Solution 5

For Button and TextView this is the easiest way:

Button:

Button button = (Button) findViewById(R.id.btton1);
button.setPaintFlags(button.getPaintFlags() | Paint.UNDERLINE_TEXT_FLAG);

Textview:

TextView textView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.textview1);
textView.setPaintFlags(textView.getPaintFlags() | Paint.UNDERLINE_TEXT_FLAG);

View more solutions

620,127

Author by

SHRISH M

Updated on December 15, 2021

Comments

SHRISH M over 2 years

How can I define underlined text in an Android layout xml file?
Jono almost 13 years

Hi, i tried the above resource xml code and it diddnt work. it continued to display the underline as a plain text
Josh almost 13 years

See also: android.text.Html.fromHtml( ) which returns a Spanned.
user898763452 about 12 years

underlined here works perfectly. underline did not work. This is for Android 2.2. Maybe different versions interpret it differently.
Ognyan about 12 years

@autotravis which one is for 2.2? I did not tested it on older versions and it will be quite unfortunate if different versions handle it differently... Also at least current documentation states that it have to be escaped (link is in the answer).
user898763452 about 12 years

I've tested underlined on android 2.3 and it works. underline does not work for 2.3. The docs say "Sometimes you may want to create a styled text resource that is also used as a format string. Normally, this won't work because the String.format(String, Object...) method will strip all the style information from the string. The work-around to this is to write the HTML tags with escaped entities, which are then recovered with fromHtml(String), after the formatting takes place." So I guess you would use the escaping if you run it through that String.format(...) method.
Ognyan about 12 years

@autotravis yes, you are correct. I use it with String.format(...). I've edited my answer, thank you for your feedback.
Roy Solberg almost 12 years

On 2.3 and 4.1 (only ones I tried so far) you can just use textView.setText(getText(R.string.text)) instead of having to use getString(), Html.fromHtml() and String.format().
Chris Rae over 11 years

Make sure you edit the string resource file inside the actual XML rather than inside the helper editing UI in Eclipse, at it will escape the <s.
kwishnu almost 11 years

Maybe a minor point, but OP wanted this defined in XML layout file; otherwise, this is a great solution.
Bobs almost 11 years

use this solution if you want to clear it
Justin over 10 years

While this example works, I quickly realized that if you ever want to have additional control in XML that this just won't do... I have switched to a better solution that involves the following steps: 1) Subclass textview 2) Add support to underline the text via custom attributes to do the underlining as specified above. The only difference is that you only execute the underline code if the custom attribute is set.
gdrt about 10 years

You should type it in strings.xml file itself, not doing it by add button. Otherwise you will get this in your strings.xml file and underline in your code
Bob Barbara about 10 years

I have come across cases when underlying through  tags does not work, e.g. sometimes if you are using a custom font. However, underlying programmatically by UnderlineSpan has yet to fail on me, so I would recommend it as the most reliable solution.
Nilesh about 10 years

Writing in the xml resource file did not work for me on Android SDK 4.0.3 . But Java code worked. Thank you
jean d'arme almost 9 years

It won't show in editor, but when You start You app - it will be underlined.
Rudy Kurniawan about 8 years

this solution can be used for a Button too
Alex almost 8 years

what if I want to have a bit of space between text and underline ?
fadden almost 8 years

FWIW, text worked for a string resource in an app running on Marshmallow. I entered it directly with a text editor, not a fancy text-escaping resource editor.
Gal Rom over 6 years

Don't use getString to fetch the string from your xml, use it directly e.g: tv.setText(R.string.your_html_string); Then it will work.
Martin Marconcini over 6 years

Careful if you use custom fonts or similar, you may need to | Paint.ANTI_ALIAS_FLAG as well or you text will look very sharp. This manifests in lower APIs more often than not.
xarlymg89 over 6 years

The look and feel of Widget.AppCompat.Button.Borderless.Colored is much better than underlining, however, as @Kiril Vashilo described, you can do it anyway.
hqzxzwb about 6 years

@jonney Replace < with < and > with >, then this should work.
Ivan Mitsura about 6 years

this is the perfect solution for all view underline with custom color. do not disrespect the transparent background here, for android 4 it is required, your view will have black background w/o it
OhhhThatVarun almost 5 years

Awesome!! But the color of the underline is gray how to change it to black or any other color?
Albert Vila Calvo almost 5 years

In Kotlin: textView.paintFlags = textView.paintFlags or Paint.UNDERLINE_TEXT_FLAG
Tuan Chau over 4 years

For String resource, we need to wrap the text inside <![CDATA[ content ]] -> <string ...><![CDATA[content]]</string>
Mark Delphi over 4 years

You saved my time as well as number of code lines :)
Jeffrey Blattman almost 4 years

For this, this forces the text to be upper case, gives it a large border, and makes it larger than the default text.
Edric almost 4 years

How is this answer any different from this answer posted on April 5?
StayCool over 3 years

and how to remove that UNDERLINE_TEXT_FLAG?)