How to use formatted strings together with placeholders in Android?

Question

In Android it is possible to use placeholders in strings, such as:

<string name="number">My number is %1$d</string> 

and then in Java code (inside a subclass of Activity):

String res = getString(R.string.number); String formatted = String.format(res, 5); 

or even simpler:

String formatted = getString(R.string.number, 5); 

It is also possible to use some HTML tags in Android string resources:

<string name="underline"><u>Underline</u> example</string> 

Since the String itself cannot hold any information about formatting, one should use getText(int) instead of getString(int) method:

CharSequence formatted = getText(R.string.underline); 

The returned CharSequence can be then passed to Android widgets, such as TextView, and the marked phrase will be underlined.

However, I could not find how to combine these two methodes, using formatted string together with placeholders:

<string name="underlined_number">My number is <u>%1$d</u></string> 

How to process above resource in the Java code to display it in a TextView, substituting %1$d with an integer?

Answer 1

Finally I managed to find a working solution and wrote my own method for replacing placeholders, preserving formatting:

public static CharSequence getText(Context context, int id, Object... args) {     for(int i = 0; i < args.length; ++i)         args[i] = args[i] instanceof String? TextUtils.htmlEncode((String)args[i]) : args[i];     return Html.fromHtml(String.format(Html.toHtml(new SpannedString(context.getText(id))), args)); } 

This approach does not require to escape HTML tags manually neither in a string being formatted nor in strings that replace placeholders.