android - Specifying "strikethrough" on a section of TextView text

Question

I have a block of text coming from a webservice, and depending on some tags which I have predefined, I want to style the text before setting it to my TextView. For bold, italics, and underline, I was able to do this easily with the replaceAll command:

PageText = PageText.replaceAll("\*([a-zA-Z0-9]+)\*", "<b>$1</b>");
        PageText = PageText.replaceAll("=([a-zA-Z0-9]+)=", "<i>$1</i>");            
        PageText = PageText.replaceAll("_([a-zA-Z0-9]+)_", "<u>$1</u>");
txtPage.setText(Html.fromHtml(PageText), TextView.BufferType.SPANNABLE);

So, to bold a word, surround it with *'s, for italics, surround with _.

But, for strikethrough, Html.fromHtml does not support the "strike" tag, so it can't be done this same way. I've seen examples of using Spannable to set the styling on one section of text, but it requires positional numbers. So, I guess I could loop through the text, searching for - (the tag to represent the strike), then searching for the next one, spanning the text in between, and repeating for all such strings. It will end up being 10 lines of looping code as opposed to 1 for the others, so I'm wondering if there is a more elegant solution out there.

Answer 1

If it is just TextView you can strike through using paint flags

TextView tv=(TextView) v.findViewById(android.R.id.text1);
tv.setPaintFlags(tv.getPaintFlags() | Paint.STRIKE_THRU_TEXT_FLAG);