Is there a way to style a TextView to uppercase all of its letters?

Question

I though that was a pretty reasonable request but it looks like you cant do it at this time. What a Total Failure. lol

Update

You can now use textAllCaps to force all caps.

What about android:textAllCaps?

By using AppCompat textAllCaps in Android Apps supporting older API's (less than 14)

There is one UI widgets that ships with AppCompat named CompatTextView is a Custom TextView extension that adds support for textAllCaps

For newer android API > 14 you can use :

android:textAllCaps="true"

A simple example:

<android.support.v7.internal.widget.CompatTextView
        android:id="@+id/text"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        app:textAllCaps="true"/>

Source:developer.android

Update:

As it so happens CompatTextView was replaced by AppCompatTextView in latest appcompat-v7 library ~ Eugen Pechanec

It is really very disappointing that you can't do it with styles (<item name="android:textAllCaps">true</item>) or on each XML layout file with the textAllCaps attribute, and the only way to do it is actually using theString.toUpperCase() on each of the strings when you do a textViewXXX.setText(theString).

In my case, I did not wanted to have theString.toUpperCase() everywhere in my code but to have a centralized place to do it because I had some Activities and lists items layouts with TextViews that where supposed to be capitalized all the time (a title) and other who did not... so... some people may think is an overkill, but I created my own CapitalizedTextView class extending android.widget.TextView and overrode the setText method capitalizing the text on the fly.

At least, if the design changes or I need to remove the capitalized text in future versions, I just need to change to normal TextView in the layout files.

Now, take in consideration that I did this because the App's Designer actually wanted this text (the titles) in CAPS all over the App no matter the original content capitalization, and also I had other normal TextViews where the capitalization came with the the actual content.

This is the class:

package com.realactionsoft.android.widget;

import android.content.Context; 
import android.util.AttributeSet; 
import android.view.ViewTreeObserver; 
import android.widget.TextView;


public class CapitalizedTextView extends TextView implements ViewTreeObserver.OnPreDrawListener {

    public CapitalizedTextView(Context context) {
        super(context);
    }

    public CapitalizedTextView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
    }

    public CapitalizedTextView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) {
        super(context, attrs, defStyle);
    }

    @Override
    public void setText(CharSequence text, BufferType type) {
        super.setText(text.toString().toUpperCase(), type);
    }

}

And whenever you need to use it, just declare it with all the package in the XML layout:

<com.realactionsoft.android.widget.CapitalizedTextView 
        android:id="@+id/text_view_title"
        android:layout_width="wrap_content"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content" />

Some will argue that the correct way to style text on a TextView is to use a SpannableString, but I think that would be even a greater overkill, not to mention more resource-consuming because you'll be instantiating another class than TextView.

I've come up with a solution which is similar with RacZo's in the fact that I've also created a subclass of TextView which handles making the text upper-case.

The difference is that instead of overriding one of the setText() methods, I've used a similar approach to what the TextView actually does on API 14+ (which is in my point of view a cleaner solution).

If you look into the source, you'll see the implementation of setAllCaps():

public void setAllCaps(boolean allCaps) {
    if (allCaps) {
        setTransformationMethod(new AllCapsTransformationMethod(getContext()));
    } else {
        setTransformationMethod(null);
    }
}

The AllCapsTransformationMethod class is not (currently) public, but still, the source is also available. I've simplified that class a bit (removed the setLengthChangesAllowed() method), so the complete solution is this:

public class UpperCaseTextView extends TextView {

    public UpperCaseTextView(Context context) {
        super(context);
        setTransformationMethod(upperCaseTransformation);
    }

    public UpperCaseTextView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs) {
        super(context, attrs);
        setTransformationMethod(upperCaseTransformation);
    }

    public UpperCaseTextView(Context context, AttributeSet attrs, int defStyle) {
        super(context, attrs, defStyle);
        setTransformationMethod(upperCaseTransformation);
    }

    private final TransformationMethod upperCaseTransformation =
            new TransformationMethod() {

        private final Locale locale = getResources().getConfiguration().locale;

        @Override
        public CharSequence getTransformation(CharSequence source, View view) {
            return source != null ? source.toString().toUpperCase(locale) : null;
        }

        @Override
        public void onFocusChanged(View view, CharSequence sourceText,
                boolean focused, int direction, Rect previouslyFocusedRect) {}
    };
}