Android Material Design TextInputEditText not able to get the string

Question

I am using material design in my android app registration page. I have used the following code in my xml file.

XML File

<com.google.android.material.textfield.TextInputLayout
            android:layout_width="match_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"
            android:id="@+id/regEmailId"
            android:hint="Email Id"
            style="@style/Widget.MaterialComponents.TextInputLayout.OutlinedBox">

            <com.google.android.material.textfield.TextInputEditText
                android:layout_width="match_parent"
                android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>

        </com.google.android.material.textfield.TextInputLayout>

The above xml is rendered from inside a linear layout.

In my Java file, I have written the following:

TextInputLayout regMailId = findViewById(R.id.regEmailId);
Editable regEmail =  regMailId.getEditText().getText();

I followed the option given in this SO post here. Though the answer indicates I should use

String text = textInputLayout.getEditText().getText();

I am getting an error with Android Studio forcing me to change this to:

Change variable text type to editable
Migrate text type to editable
Wrap using String.valueOf()

If I wrap using string value of

String text = String.valueOf( regMailId.getEditText().getText() );

I am not getting the output of variable text.

When I changed it to

Editable regEmail =  regMailId.getEditText().getText();

I am able to toast the input text, but I could not get the actual text to do any validations on top of them. For example, the password and confirmpassword fields, I am not able to compare though I could see the values getting toasted.

When I tried to get the variable type for regEmail, I got the following toasted:

java.lang.String.android.text.SpannableStringBuilder

I tried extracting string by using toString(), getText().toString(), etc to the regEmail. Nothing worked.

How do I get the string of the textinput field in material design layout.

The following is my app gradle:

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'

android {
    compileSdkVersion 29

    defaultConfig {
        applicationId "com.example.telescope"
        minSdkVersion 16
        targetSdkVersion 29
        versionCode 1
        versionName "1.0"
        multiDexEnabled true
        testInstrumentationRunner "androidx.test.runner.AndroidJUnitRunner"
    }

    compileOptions {
        sourceCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
        targetCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
    }


    buildTypes {
        release {
            minifyEnabled false
            proguardFiles getDefaultProguardFile('proguard-android-optimize.txt'), 'proguard-rules.pro'
        }
    }
}

dependencies {
    implementation fileTree(dir: "libs", include: ["*.jar"])
    implementation 'androidx.appcompat:appcompat:1.2.0'
    implementation 'androidx.constraintlayout:constraintlayout:1.1.3'
    testImplementation 'junit:junit:4.12'
    androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test.ext:junit:1.1.1'
    androidTestImplementation 'androidx.test.espresso:espresso-core:3.2.0'
    implementation 'com.google.android.material:material:1.2.0'
    implementation 'com.android.support:multidex:2.0.0'
    implementation 'com.amplifyframework:core:1.1.2'
    implementation 'com.amplifyframework:aws-datastore:1.1.2'
    implementation 'com.amplifyframework:aws-api:1.1.2'
    implementation 'com.amplifyframework:aws-auth-cognito:1.3.0'

}

Give id to TextInputEditText and try getText() from there , you are trying to get text from layout — Danial clarc, Oct 02 '20 at 06:56
@Danialclarc I am sorry. This was not working and it renders the app crashing down. I tried both including a new id for text input while retaining the id for layout, as well as retaining the id only for the input and removing the id for layout. Thank you for your suggestion though. — Apricot, Oct 02 '20 at 07:18

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 02 '20 at 07:04

1

To get the text in the 'real time', you should add TextChangeListener to the EditText object:

TextInputLayout regMailId = findViewById(R.id.regEmailId);
regEmailId.getEditText().addTextChangedListener(new TextWatcher() {

   public void afterTextChanged(Editable s) {}

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

   public void onTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start,
     int before, int count) {
         //get the String from CharSequence with s.toString() and process it to validation

   }
  });

answered Oct 02 '20 at 07:04

Mariusz Brona

1,549
10
12

Thanks a ton. This worked!. I have been struggling for more than a week to get this working. Thank you. – Apricot Oct 02 '20 at 07:25
Great! I'm happy I could help you with this :) – Mariusz Brona Oct 02 '20 at 07:26

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 19 '22 at 19:53

Simply you can add an id attribute to the [com.google.android.material.textfield.TextInputEditText], then you will be able to call it from the Java class.

 <com.google.android.material.textfield.TextInputEditText
            android:id="@+id/edittext"
            android:layout_width="match_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>

Then you can inflate this in the Java class, and get its object

TextInputEditText textInputEditText = findViewById(R.id.edittext);
// Get text
textInputEditText.getText().toString();
// watch the edit text
textInputEditText.addTextChangedListener(new TextWatcher() {
            @Override
            public void beforeTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start, int count, int after) {
                
            }

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

            }

            @Override
            public void afterTextChanged(Editable s) {

            }
        });

Android Material Design TextInputEditText not able to get the string

2 Answers2