CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidandroid-edittext
Eliseo Bao Souto
Eliseo Bao Souto

Reputation: 33

Accept only letters and capitalize first character in EditText

I need an EditText to only allow letters and capitalize the first character.

To only allow letters, I set the property android:digits="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ " in the XML layout and it worked properly. Then, I also set the property android:inputType="textCapSentences" to capitalize the first letter, but it didn't work.

Just to know what was going on I tried to remove the digits property and then the textCapSentences property worked fine.

So, the thing is: I can use one property or the other, but I can't get them both working at the same time. How can I solve this? May I need to solve it programmatically? Thanks.

<EditText
        android:id="@+id/et_name"
        android:layout_width="match_parent"
        android:layout_height="wrap_content"
        android:digits="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ "
        android:inputType="textCapSentences"
        android:hint="@string/et_hint" />

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1197

Answers (4)

Adnan Khan
Adnan Khan

Reputation: 106

You can use multiple values for an attribute like this android:inputType="textCapSentences|text" Hope this helps.

Upvotes: 0

Denysole
Denysole

Reputation: 4051

If you want you to capitalize each new word, you should use another inputType:

 android:inputType="textCapWords"

If you want to capitalize the first letter of each new sentence, you can add . to your digits, it will help system recognize new sentence:

 android:digits="abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. "

Upvotes: 0

Lincoln White
Lincoln White

Reputation: 649

Keep the textCapSentences property and do the letter checking programatically like this:

et_name.setFilters(new InputFilter[] { filter }); 

InputFilter filter = new InputFilter() { 
public CharSequence filter(CharSequence source, int start, int end, Spanned dest, int dstart, int dend) { 
    for (int i = start;i < end;i++) { 
        if (!Character.isLetter(source.charAt(0))) { 
            return ""; 
        } 
    } 
    return null; 
} 
};

Upvotes: 1

Michael Kemp
Michael Kemp

Reputation: 300

I don't know about using the two properties together, but if one works by itself one solution could be to use textCapSentences on your EditText and code a text filter, like so:

public static InputFilter[] myFilter = new InputFilter[] {
    new InputFilter() {
        public CharSequence filter(CharSequence source, int start, int end,
                                   Spanned dest, int dstart, int dend) {
            for (int i = start; i < end; i++) {
                if (!Character.isLetterOrDigit(source.charAt(i)) &&
                        source.charAt(i) != '@' &&
                        source.charAt(i) != '#') {
                    Log.i(TAG, "Invalid character: " + source.charAt(i));
                    return "";
                }
            }
            return null;
        }
    }
};

This example accepts 0-9, all letters (upper and lowercase), as well as the charcters @ and #, just to give an example. If you try to enter any other character it will return "", and essentially ignore it.

Apply it when initializing the Edit Text:

    EditText editText = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.my_text);
    editText.setFilters(myFilter);

Upvotes: 1

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