Is there a way to hide text in a TextView?

Question

Is there a way to hide some (but not all) of the text in a TextView? I tried setting the size to 0 with AbsoluteSizeSpan, but that doesn't have any visual effect that I see. (You can set the size to 1, and you essentially get bumpy lines instead of readable text. Cute, but not quite what I'm after.)

By hide, I mean go away, not be visible and not take up space. Drawing text with the same color as the background isn't what I'm looking for.

I realize I can just replace the text in the TextView with only the text I want to display, but I'm already using spans to do a lot more dynamic styling, and something like a HiddenSpan would be useful. Does it exist?

Answer 1

<TextView
  android:layout_width="wrap_content"
  android:layout_height="wrap_content"
  android:textSize="0sp"
  android:textColor="@android:color/transparent" />

Transparent text color hides the visibility of the text. Add textSize to that to remove or minimize the space it takes up.