URLSpans in WebView?

Issue

I need to push text into WebView. But there are a lot of different HTML tags in this text and I want to parse it before.

Spanned html = Html.fromHtml(texts.get(i));

But I need to change URLs in the text to call one function in my activity. In TextView I may do it like that:

ClickableSpan[] items = spans.getSpans(0, spans.length(), ClickableSpan.class);
for (ClickableSpan s : items) {
    final String url = ((URLSpan)s).getURL();
    int spanStart = spans.getSpanStart(s);
    int spanEnd = spans.getSpanEnd(s);
    spans.removeSpan(s);
    spans.setSpan(new URLSpan(url) {
        @Override
        public void onClick(View widget) {
            //code for overriding onClick goes here            
        }
    }, spanStart, spanEnd, Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
}

Is it possible to use Html.fromHTML() AND to change links in text to call my function when using WebView instead of TextView?

Solution

Not really, because WebView understands HTML, not a Spanned. You are welcome to try to convert the Spanned back into HTML via Html.toHtml(), but the round-trip conversion from HTML to Spanned to HTML is likely to make a hash of any complex formatting, because they are not complete HTML parsers or generators.

I would recommend that you find and use some Java library that is designed to parse and help you fix up HTML.

Answered By - CommonsWare