My 100th Post! 🎉

Problem:
I needed to be able to display parsed, dynamically fetched html anchor tags in an Android TextView. I struggled with a few of these concepts and some of the requirements between various API levels.

Solution:
Begin by parsing the html text into a Spanned. I wrote a private helper function to accomplish this:

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private Spanned parseHtmlText (final String text) {
    if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.N) {
      return Html.fromHtml(text, Html.FROM_HTML_MODE_COMPACT);
    } else {
      return Html.fromHtml(text);
    }
}

To make this work on Nougat and above you need to provide the following flag: Html.FROM_HTML_MODE_COMPAT. Set the TextView text using the Spanned return value. Use the Linkify utility (Linkify API Reference), set the MovementMethod and linksClickable:

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TextView textView;
 
textView.setText(parseHtmlText("Unlinked text. <a href="\&quot;https://www.rileymacdonald.ca\&quot;">Linked Text</a>. More unlinked text"));
Linkify.addLinks(textView, Linkify.ALL);
textView.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getInstance());
textView.setLinksClickable(true); // or using style/XML true or XML linksClickable="true"

Any html anchors should now be parsed and displayed as expected.

Caveats
I’ve found the above approach to work however when combined with the following xml tags/styles it fails (text is shown but it isn’t clickable/linked:

• textIsSelectable="true" or true
• autoLink="all" or all