Can't get ellipsis to work on Android

Question

I have a TextView. I want it to ellipsize if longer than its available width. This does not work unless the input string has no spaces... can anyone provide an example of this working? I've tried different combinations of:

singleLine="true" maxLines="1" scrollHorizontally="false"

none of these have any effect. Again, if I supply a string that has no spaces in it, then the ellipsis appears correctly. What am I missing? I've tried this on 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, all same problem.

Thanks

A quick and hacky solution might be to display your string using non-breaking spaces instead of the regular spaces. — Paul McMillan, Nov 09 '09 at 05:57

score 12 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 09 '09 at 20:38

12

Ellipsize is broken (go vote on the bug report, especially since they claim it's not reproducible) so you have to use a minor hack. Use:

android:inputType="text"
android:maxLines="1"

on anything you want to ellipsize. Also, don't use singleLine, it's been deprecated since 1.5.

answered Nov 09 '09 at 20:38

Jeremy Logan

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@fiXedd: except that your method doesn't work - as per your link and BGS's comment, what works for me is comment #9: Try to use android:lines="1" and android:scrollHorizontally="true" instead of android:singleLine="true"_ – Richard Le Mesurier Nov 04 '11 at 07:30
For TextView's, `android:ellipsize="end"` combined with `android:maxLines="1"` works great ! – Someone Somewhere Sep 10 '13 at 19:09
This way I get spell-check on textView's. Which looks strange and makes my big ass listview laggy. So it left me no other choise than using `android:singleLine="true"`. – Roel May 04 '15 at 15:19

score 11 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 02 '10 at 19:37

11

this was the only combination that I could get to work on SDK ver4:

android:ellipsize="end"
android:singleLine="true"

(Yes I know it says it's deprecated but I'm left without a choice)

answered Sep 02 '10 at 19:37

Ross Hambrick

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score 2 · Answer 3 · edited Jul 15 '14 at 11:02

2

Try with:

textView.setSingleLine();
TruncateAt truncate = TruncateAt.END;
textView.setEllipsize(truncate);

edited Jul 15 '14 at 11:02

Zeeshan

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answered May 26 '10 at 12:29

jgimbert

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score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 15 '13 at 08:18

0

Simple Solution.

int limit = 9;
if (str.length() > limit) {
    textView.setText(str.substring(0, limit)+"...");
} else {
    textView.setText(str);
}

answered Feb 15 '13 at 08:18

coderek

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No combination of the xml properties worked for me. To save time and to know 100% what I'm going to get on whatever OS I went with this. Thanks. – Alfie Hanssen Oct 23 '13 at 21:21
That summarizes the Android Development experience in general – menawi Jan 25 '16 at 06:24

Can't get ellipsis to work on Android

4 Answers4

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