Android – How to set the text color of TextView in code

androidcolorstextview

In XML, we can set a text color by the textColor attribute, like android:textColor="#FF0000". But how do I change it by coding?

I tried something like:

holder.text.setTextColor(R.color.Red);

Where holder is just a class and text is of type TextView. Red is an RGB value (#FF0000) set in strings.

But it shows a different color rather than red. What kind of parameter can we pass in setTextColor()? In documentation, it says int, but is it a resource reference value or anything else?

Best Answer

You should use:

holder.text.setTextColor(Color.RED);

You can use various functions from the Color class to get the same effect of course.

  • Color.parseColor (Manual) (like LEX uses)

    text.setTextColor(Color.parseColor("#FFFFFF"));

  • Color.rgb and Color.argb (Manual rgb) (Manual argb) (like Ganapathy uses)

    holder.text.setTextColor(Color.rgb(200,0,0));
holder.text.setTextColor(Color.argb(0,200,0,0));

  • And of course, if you want to define your color in an XML file, you can do this:

    <color name="errorColor">#f00</color>

    because the getColor() function is deprecated1, you need to use it like so:

    ContextCompat.getColor(context, R.color.your_color);

  • You can also insert plain HEX, like so:

    myTextView.setTextColor(0xAARRGGBB);

    Where you have an alpha-channel first, then the color value.

Check out the complete manual of course, public class Color extends Object.

1This code used to be in here as well:

textView.setTextColor(getResources().getColor(R.color.errorColor));

This method is now deprecated in Android M. You can however use it from the contextCompat in the support library, as the example now shows.

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