android - EditText - change background color of text (and only text - not the whole view)

Question

When a user enters information in an EditText, and moves to the next EditText, the information is highlighted as shown below:

The code for this:

edittext.setOnFocusChangeListener(new OnFocusChangeListener() {

@Override
public void onFocusChange(View v, boolean hasFocus) {
    if (hasFocus) {
        v.setBackgroundColor(Color.WHITE);
        ((EditText) v).setTextColor(Color.BLACK);
    } else {

        //v.setBackgroundColor(Color.LTGRAY); //also works like this
        ((EditText) v).setBackgroundColor(Color.LTGRAY);
        ((EditText) v).setTextColor(Color.BLACK);
    }

   }
});

Which is called in the onCreate method like this:

edittext = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.editText1);

However, It would be much better if the background color only applied to the text itself, rather than the view, like this (from the gmail app):

Does anybody have any suggestions on how to apply the background color to the text only (not the whole EditText view) as above?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can achieve what you want by using a BackgroundColorSpan. You can find more information here:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/text/style/BackgroundColorSpan.html

To use spans you need to build a SpannableString which you can do using a SpannableStringBuilder:

http://developer.android.com/reference/android/text/SpannableStringBuilder.html