Can we have uneditable text in edittext

Question

Hi,

I am using an EditText. Is it possible to have a part of text uneditable and the rest editable in the same EditText?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

You can implement a TextChangedListener where you make sure those parts of your text wont get deleted/overwritten.

class TextChangedListener implements TextWatcher {
 public void afterTextChanged(Editable s) {
                makeSureNothingIsDeleted();
 }

 public void beforeTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start, int count, int after) {}

 public void onTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start, int before, int count) {}
}

---

 TextChangedListener tcl = new TextChangedListener();
 my_editable.addTextChangedListener(tcl);

Answer 2

You could use

editText.setFocusable(false);

or

editText.setEnabled(false);

although disabling the EditText does currently not ignore input from the on-screen keyboard (I think that's a bug).

Depending on the application it might be better to use an InputFilter that rejects all changes:

editText.setFilters(new InputFilter[] {
    new InputFilter() {
     public CharSequence filter(CharSequence src, int start,
      int end, Spanned dst, int dstart, int dend) {
      return src.length() < 1 ? dst.subSequence(dstart, dend) : "";
     }
    }
});

Also see this question.