Paste without rich text formatting into EditText

Question

If I copy/paste text from Chrome for Android into my EditText view it gets messed up, apparently due to rich text formatting.

Is there a way to tell the EditText view to ignore rich text formatting? Or can I catch the paste event and remove it before it gets set? How would I do that?

UPDATE: So I realized that the editText.getText() gives me a SpannableString that contains some formatting. I can get rid of that by calling .clearSpans(); on it. BUT I cannot do anything like that in editText.addTextChangedListener(new TextWatcher() { … } because it gets terribly slow and the UI only updates when I leave the editText view.

Answer 1

A perfect and easy way: Override the EditText's onTextContextMenuItem and intercept the android.R.id.paste to be android.R.id.pasteAsPlainText

@Override public boolean onTextContextMenuItem(int id) {     if (id == android.R.id.paste) {         if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.M) {             id = android.R.id.pasteAsPlainText;         } else {             onInterceptClipDataToPlainText();         }     }     return super.onTextContextMenuItem(id); }   private void onInterceptClipDataToPlainText() {     ClipboardManager clipboard = (ClipboardManager) getContext()         .getSystemService(Context.CLIPBOARD_SERVICE);     ClipData clip = clipboard.getPrimaryClip();     if (clip != null) {         for (int i = 0; i < clip.getItemCount(); i++) {             final CharSequence paste;             // Get an item as text and remove all spans by toString().             final CharSequence text = clip.getItemAt(i).coerceToText(getContext());             paste = (text instanceof Spanned) ? text.toString() : text;             if (paste != null) {                 ClipBoards.copyToClipBoard(getContext(), paste);             }         }     } } 

And the copyToClipBoard:

public class ClipBoards {      public static void copyToClipBoard(@NonNull Context context, @NonNull CharSequence text) {         ClipData clipData = ClipData.newPlainText("rebase_copy", text);         ClipboardManager manager = (ClipboardManager) context             .getSystemService(Context.CLIPBOARD_SERVICE);         manager.setPrimaryClip(clipData);     } }