Android Syntax Highlighting?

android, editor, syntax, syntax-highlighting

Solution

For read-only syntax highlighting, you have two options:

Find a Java library that can syntax highlight and generate HTML using `<font color="">` (i.e., no CSS). You can then use `Html.fromHtml()` to create a `Spanned` object which you can hand to a `TextView`.

Find a Java library that can syntax highlight and generate any sort of HTML. You can then display that in a `WebView`. This appears to be what the `android-codepad` project a commenter linked to does.

If you are seeking syntax highlighting for an editor, that is significantly more difficult. While `EditText` can take the same `Spanned` that `TextView` can, you would have to run everything through the syntax highlighter to reflect changes, either on a per-keystroke basis, or after a pause in typing. Or, you would need to bake the syntax highlighting rules much more tightly to the editing process, so you can somehow incrementally adjust the highlighting without having to redo the entire contents of the `EditText`. I have not seen an open source syntax-highlighting editor for Android -- a few closed-source ones as apps on the Play Store, though.

Problem

Original source