Android: How to determine character index of a touch event's position in TextView?

Question

I have a TextView with an OnTouchListener. What I want is the character index the user is pointing to when I get the MotionEvent. Is there any way to get to the underlying font metrics of the TextView?

Answer 1

I am not aware of a simple direct way to do this but you should be able to put something together using the Paint object of the TextView via a call to TextView.getPaint()

Once you have the paint object you will have access to the underlying FontMetrices via a call to Paint.getFontMetrics() and have access to other functions like Paint.measureText() Paint.getTextBounds(), and Paint.getTextWidths() for accessing the actual size of the displayed text.