[android] How to set underline text on textview?

How to set underline text on textview?

I have used following code but it is not working.

tvHide.setText(Html.fromHtml("<p><u>Hide post</u></p>").toString());

This question is related to android textview

The answer is


You can easily add a View with the height of 1dp aligning start and the end of TextView, right below it. You can also use marginTop with negative value to make the underline closer to TextView. If you use your TextView and the under inside a relative layout, it would be much easier for alignments. here is the example:

<RelativeLayout
android:layout_width="match_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content">

<View
  android:id="@+id/viewForgotPasswordUnderline"
  android:layout_width="wrap_content"
  android:layout_height="1dp"
  android:layout_below="@id/txtForgotPassword"
  android:layout_alignStart="@id/txtForgotPassword"
  android:layout_alignEnd="@id/txtForgotPassword"
  android:layout_marginTop="-2dp"
  android:background="@color/lightGray" />

<androidx.appcompat.widget.AppCompatTextView
  android:id="@+id/txtForgotPassword"
  android:layout_width="wrap_content"
  android:layout_height="wrap_content"
  android:layout_centerHorizontal="true"
  android:paddingTop="8dp"
  android:text="@string/userLoginForgotPassword"
  android:textColor="@color/lightGray"
  android:textSize="16dp" />
</RelativeLayout>

Try this,

tv.setPaintFlags(Paint.UNDERLINE_TEXT_FLAG);

You can do it like:

tvHide.setText(Html.fromHtml("<p><span style='text-decoration: underline'>Hide post</span></p>").toString());

Hope this helps


In my sign_in.xml file I used this:

<Button
    android:id="@+id/signuptextlinkbtn"
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content"
    android:layout_marginTop="10dp"
    android:background="@android:color/transparent"
    android:onClick="performSingUpMethod"
    android:text="Sign up now!"
    android:textColor="#5B55FF"
    android:textSize="15dp"
    android:textStyle="bold" />

In my SignIn.java file, I used this:

import android.graphics.Paint;
Button signuptextlinkbutton = (Button) findViewById(R.id.signuptextlinkbtn);
signuptextlinkbutton.setPaintFlags(signuptextlinkbutton.getPaintFlags()| Paint.UNDERLINE_TEXT_FLAG);

Now I can see my link underlined. It was simply text even thought I declared it as a Button.


Following are the some approaches for underlined text in android:

1st Approach

You can define your string in strings.xml

<string name="your_string"><u>Underlined text</u></string>

And use that string in your xml file

<TextView
            android:id="@+id/txt_underlined"
            android:layout_width="wrap_content"
            android:layout_height="match_parent"
            android:text="@string/your_string"/>

Or you can use that string in your Activity/Fragment

txtView.setText(R.string.your_string);

2nd Approach

To underline the text in TextView, you can use SpannableString

String text="Underlined Text";
SpannableString content = new SpannableString(text);
content.setSpan(new UnderlineSpan(), 0, text.length(), 0);
txtView.setText(content);

3rd Approach

You can make use of setPaintFlags method of TextView to underline the text of TextView.

txtView.setPaintFlags(mTextView.getPaintFlags() | Paint.UNDERLINE_TEXT_FLAG);
txtView.setText("Underlined Text");

4th Approach

Make use of Html.fromHtml(htmlString);

String htmlString="<u>Underlined Text</u>";
txtView.setText(Html.fromHtml(htmlString));

Or

txtView.setText(Html.fromHtml("<u>underlined</u> text"));

Note:

If you have added this line android:textAllCaps="true" in your layout, then none of the above will work. For that, you have to define your string in Caps and then any of the above approach.


Use this

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

I believe that you need to use CharSequence. You can find an example here.


you're almost there: just don't call toString() on Html.fromHtml() and you get a Spanned Object which will do the job ;)

tvHide.setText(Html.fromHtml("<p><u>Hide post</u></p>"));

Simple and easy way to display underline in TextView is:

yourTextView.getPaint().setUnderlineText(true);

And if you want to remove underlining for that view, you can write below code:

yourTextView.getPaint().setUnderlineText(false);

It will work even though you set android:textAllCaps="true"


Android supports string formatting using HTML tags in the strings xml. So the following would work:

<string name="label_testinghtmltags"><u>This text has an underscore</u></string>

Then you just use it as you normally would. You can see more in the documentation here

Update:

To further expand on the answer, the documentation says:

... the format(String, Object...) and getString(int, Object...) methods 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

For example, the resulting string from the following code snippet will not show up as containing underscored elements:

<string name="html_bold_test">This <u>%1$s</u> has an underscore</string>
String result = getString(R.string.html_bold_test, "text")

However the result from the following snippet would contain underscores:

<string name="html_bold_test">This &lt;u> %1$s &lt;/u> has an underscore</string>
String result = Html.fromHtml(getString(R.string.html_bold_test, "text"))

Need not to use HTML properties, let's focus on java xD I had the same problem, i found the way to do it in java:

String text="Hide post";
TextView tvHide=(TextView)findViewById(R.id.text);
SpannableString spanString = new SpannableString(text);
spanString.setSpan(new UnderlineSpan(), 0, spanString.length(), 0);
tvHide.setText(spanString );