How do you get the selection color in Android?

Question

I need to get the selection color used by Android to draw ListView and EditText selection. I know these controls user selectors to draw their states, but I've written a few widgets that I want to match the selection color of the platform they are running on and the drawables that are defined can't do that because they are using 9 patch images instead of colors.

I've looked all through the Android source and haven't found a color selector or color constant I can use to get the color I'm looking for.

can u explain it in clarity? – Veerababu Medisetti Feb 12 '13 at 12:24 — Veerababu Medisetti, Feb 12 '13 at 12:24

score 4 · Answer 1 · answered Feb 18 '13 at 17:58

4

You could try this :

android:background="?android:attr/selectableItemBackground"

answered Feb 18 '13 at 17:58

lokoko

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Why this one and not @android:drawable/list_selector_background ? – aleb Feb 19 '13 at 12:04
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It's list_selector_holo_dark or the equivalent holo light version; and these are the defaults in Honeycomb and above. list_selector_background is the non-holo version, used in Gingerbread and below. You could refer to : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9250215/default-selector-background-in-clickable-views – lokoko Feb 19 '13 at 14:14

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 14 '13 at 05:19

3

you can get all the resource from here

android-sdk-windows\platforms\android-<Desire API Level>\data\res\drawable-hdpi.

or you can use directly like this

android:background="@android:drawable/list_selector_background"

or like this also

Drawable d = getResources().getDrawable(android.R.drawable.list_selector_background);

answered Feb 14 '13 at 05:19

Jignesh Ansodariya

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What api level is android:drawable/list_selector_background compatible with? – IgorGanapolsky Oct 08 '13 at 22:46
refer lokoko's answer of this question. – Jignesh Ansodariya Oct 09 '13 at 04:28

score 1 · Answer 3 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:00

1

Take a look at this answer. You can browse through the platform colors and styles at the Android github mirror. Please note this values can be different for every version of Android. If you want to use platform styles, just don't create your own custom selectors for the controls. Hope it will help.

edited May 23 '17 at 12:00

Community

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answered Feb 13 '13 at 04:02

Vadim Kotov

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score 0 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:19

You could just get the list_selector_background drawable, as explained by Jignesh, and then find its average color as shown in this answer (I'd do it in your initialization code so you don't have to waste processing them every time, but hey, that's premature optimization). That should be consistent enough with the theme to let your widgets match as needed.

Your code could look like this:

public static Color getPlatformSelectionColor(Context c) {
    Bitmap bitmap = BitmapFactory.decodeResource(c.getResources(),
                                           android.R.drawable.list_selector_background);
    long redBucket = 0;
    long greenBucket = 0;
    long blueBucket = 0;
    long pixelCount = 0;

    for (int y = 0; y < bitmap.getHeight(); y++)
    {
        for (int x = 0; x < bitmap.getWidth(); x++)
        {
            Color c = bitmap.getPixel(x, y);

            pixelCount++;
            redBucket += Color.red(c);
            greenBucket += Color.green(c);
            blueBucket += Color.blue(c);
            // does alpha matter?
        }
    }

    Color averageColor = Color.rgb(redBucket / pixelCount,
                                    greenBucket / pixelCount,
                                    blueBucket / pixelCount);
    return averageColor;
}

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 19 '13 at 08:01

You can achieve easily achieve this for google owned devices but not for other manufacturers as most of the manufacturers have overridden the default colors, layouts, backgrounds, etc for almost all the versions of android including jelly-beans.

So ideally its not recommended and also tough to follow each and everyone's design guidelines.

How do you get the selection color in Android?

5 Answers5