How can I show ellipses on my TextView if it is greater than the 1 line?

Question

This is a common problem. Try using the following:

android:scrollHorizontally="true"
android:ellipsize="end" 
android:maxLines="1"

.............. the scrollHorizontally is the "special sauce" that makes it work.

This will also make a single line with ellipsise

 android:singleLine="true"

Use this

android:ellipsize="end"  
android:singleLine="true"

---

Don't use this without fully aware of what output comes

android:ellipsize="end"  
android:maxLines="1"

When you use maxlines = 1 it will some time truncate most of the characters.

The way it worked for me on multiple devices / APIs was programmatically like this (where tv is your TextView):

    if (tv.getLineCount() > 1) {
        int lineEndIndex = tv.getLayout().getLineEnd(0);
        String text = tv.getText().subSequence(0, lineEndIndex - 3) + "\u2026";
        tv.setText(text);
    }

So all the answers above cater to the requirement that only 1 line and then the ellipsis should appear. However if you want the ellipsis to appear after certain lines of text, then you should use the following:

android:ellipsize="end"
android:maxLines="2"
android:singleLine="false"

With this the ellipsis will appear only after 2 lines. Note: Its important to have singleLine as false.