How can I make links in fromHTML clickable? (Android)

Question

This seems like a trivial problem, but is has me kind of stumped. I want to load an HTML string using Html.fromHtml(), and have any links in the string to be clickable and open in the browser.

Basic example:

textView.setText(Html.fromHtml("<a href=\"http://www.google.com\">This is a link</a>"));

With this snippet, the text is formatted as if it were a link (blue, underlined), but it's not clickable. I tried Linkify, but it only seems to work with links that are not HTML-based.

Any suggestions?

Solution 1

As I assumed, the solution was trivial:

textView.setText(Html.fromHtml("<a href=\"http://www.google.com\">This is a link</a>"));
textView.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getInstance());

The second line somehow activates the link behavior, although I'm not quite sure how. The same question is addressed over at Google Code.

Solution 2

As mentioned in other answers, a way forward is to use:

xtView.setText(Html.fromHtml("<a href=\"http://www.google.com\">This is a link</a>"));
textView.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getInstance());

However, this won't work if you have ANY android:autoLink value set, not just 'web' as other comments seem to suggest. So that means you can use this solution to linkify URLs at the expense of having phone, email and maps being disabled/unlinked.

Solution 3

The javadoc of the LinkMovementMethod says that it

Supports clicking on links with DPad Center or Enter.

So it makes sense that works that way.

And confirmed, with 4.2.2 works like charm with just the

textView.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getInstance());

Solution 4

It should be this way:

textView.setText(Html.fromHtml("<a href=\"http://www.google.com\">This is a link</a>"));
textView.setAutoLinkMask(Linkify.WEB_URLS);
textView.setLinksClickable(true);

in XML should be

<TextView
    android:id="@+id/txtview"
    android:autoLink="web"
    android:linksClickable="true"
    />

View more solutions

Comments

[Gunnar Lium]

I can't get this solution to work. Have you tried it? Seems to have the same issue of only linkifying "visible" links, not anchors with a different text.

[Blundell]

Note I tried this with referencing a String.xml resource. this WONT work. :-)

[Artem Russakovskii]

Use CDATA for strings.xml to avoid links in there to be treated at subtags.

[Glenn.nz]

Just want to point out, if this isnt working for you, make sure you dont have the android:autoLink="web" tag in your textview xml, i removed mine and the links started working fine. EDIT: and it does work on 4.0+

[MinceMan]

Work on 4.1. I'm just pass straight html and I am not pulling strings from res.

[wblaschko]

This is the the correct answer for situations where you're using Html.fromHtml(). It expands upon the selected answer.

[Henrique de Sousa]

autoLink makes our app crash on some users (but we a 20 million userbase, so it's makes a difference)

[Zach]

You should edit this to include that having the android:autoLink attribute set to anything will override the movement method

[Shadow]

Better answer than the chosen one, this addresses an issue that exists in case user has autoLink set.

[James]

linksClickable is true by default

[James]

linksClickable is true by default

[Ben]

You cannot use the binding: "binding.txt.setMovementMethod(...)", please cast into TextView to work: "TextView txt = binding.txt; txt.setMovementMethod(...)"