Android : Allow User to add only alphabets and special characters in an EditText

Question

I want the user to enter only alphabets and special characters in an EditText. One approach would be to add all the alphabets and all the special characters in the EditText's "android:digits" tag. But I don't think that a good way.

Any better way to achieve it?

You can achieve this by programatically by addTextChangedListener — Mahesh Suthar, Jul 28 '15 at 09:10
This can help ou. Just change to allow what you want in your EditText http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14192199/validation-allow-only-number-and-characters-in-edit-text-in-android — GmloMalo, Jul 28 '15 at 09:15
@jaiSoni : Because I'll have to add a lot of special characters and there's a good chance that I might miss some. I was hoping to find a way to block just numbers. I think I've found a solution. — Aditya Gupta, Jul 28 '15 at 09:19

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 28 '15 at 09:21

0

Check out EditText input type docs to find if any of these satisfy your requirement.

If not , using regular expressions to check input string from EditText is according to your required format or not is a good idea.

answered Jul 28 '15 at 09:21

Sash_KP

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 28 '15 at 09:26

I used a InputFilter to block out only numbers :

private static InputFilter filter = new InputFilter() {
    @Override
    public CharSequence filter(CharSequence source, int start, int end, Spanned dest, int dstart, int dend) {
        String blockCharacterSet = "1234567890";
        if (source != null && blockCharacterSet.contains(("" + source))) {
            return "";
        }
        return null;
    }
};

Then Applying the filter :

edittext.setFilters(new InputFilter[] { filter });

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 28 '15 at 09:41

0

Set android:digits="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz?/>,<.:";'{}[]\|)(*&^%$#@!~+=-_ etc"` attribute in edittext inside your xml. Note:- please add all available special characters in keyboard in place of etc.

answered Jul 28 '15 at 09:41

Adarsh Yadav

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it's not working: I am getting Error parsing XML: not well-formed (invalid token). I want to allow only limited characters android:digits="ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-/&^%$#@!" If I uses android:digits="ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-/" then it works but I want to allow character &^%$#@! also from XML in Android. – Faiz Anwar Sep 18 '20 at 06:05
I have a requirement where I need to allow only ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789-/&^%$#@! character from soft input key – Faiz Anwar Sep 18 '20 at 06:12

Android : Allow User to add only alphabets and special characters in an EditText

3 Answers3