How can I make links in fromHTML clickable? (Android)

Question

This seems like a trivial problem, but is has me kind of stumped. I want to load an HTML string using Html.fromHtml(), and have any links in the string to be clickable and open in the browser.

Basic example:

textView.setText(Html.fromHtml("<a href=\"http://www.google.com\">This is a link</a>")); 

With this snippet, the text is formatted as if it were a link (blue, underlined), but it's not clickable. I tried Linkify, but it only seems to work with links that are not HTML-based.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

As I assumed, the solution was trivial:

textView.setText(Html.fromHtml("<a href=\"http://www.google.com\">This is a link</a>")); textView.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getInstance()); 

The second line somehow activates the link behavior, although I'm not quite sure how. The same question is addressed over at Google Code.

Answer 2

As mentioned in other answers, a way forward is to use:

xtView.setText(Html.fromHtml("<a href=\"http://www.google.com\">This is a link</a>")); textView.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getInstance()); 

However, this won't work if you have ANY android:autoLink value set, not just 'web' as other comments seem to suggest. So that means you can use this solution to linkify URLs at the expense of having phone, email and maps being disabled/unlinked.