How do I determine how much text will fit in a TextView in Android?

Question

I have a layout that looks something like this:

[TextView 1] [TextView 2]
[ TextView 2 spill-over ]

Essentially, I need the contents of TextView 2 to wrap to the next line, but start where TextView 1 starts. I was thinking that if I knew how much text would fit into TextView 2 before it runs out of space on line one, I could take the rest of the text and put it in another TextView below the first two. So I need to measure how much text will fit into a TextView (which can be tricky because as far as I can tell, Android will try to break the text in a TextView at a good location so that it won't break a word in the middle if it can be avoided) or I need a new idea on how to lay this out.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

groomsy

Answer 1

You can create a Paint object with TextView2's text size and use breakText() to measure how many characters will fit in your TextView2's width.

(This is untested code - might need some slight modifications)

String textToBeSplit = arbitraryText; // Text you want to split between TextViews
float textView2Width = somehowGetItsWidth; // TextView2's width
float myTextSize = textView2.getTextSize();

Paint paint = new Paint();
paint.setTextSize(myTextSize); // Your text size
int numChars = paint.breakText(textToBeSplit, true, float textView2Width, null);

numChars tells you how many characters in textToBeSplit will fit in TextView2's width, enabling you to split it between your views.