Android: Make a part of TextView's text NOT-clickable at runtime?

Question

I used Android.text.style.ClickableSpan to make a part (Black) of a string (Blue | Black) clickable:

SpannableString spannableString = new SpannableString("Blue | Black ");
ClickableSpan clickableSpan = new ClickableSpan() {
    @Override
    public void onClick(View textView) {
        //...
    }
};
ss.setSpan(clickableSpan, 7, 11, Spanned.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);

TextView textView = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.secondActivity_textView4);
textView.setText(spannableString);
textView.setMovementMethod(LinkMovementMethod.getInstance());

So Black part of the string is clickable. What I want is that when the user clicks Black, it should make Black Not-clickable, and Blue (another part of the same string) clickable.

So to make Blue clickable, we can call setSpan() on the same spannableString another time. But how can I make Black not-clickable?

Answer 1

You can call removeSpan() to remove any previously added Spans. In this particular case it's very easy, as we hold a reference to the very Span we want to remove:

ClickableSpan clickableSpan = new ClickableSpan()
{
    @Override
    public void onClick(View view)
    {
        ((SpannableString)textView.getText()).removeSpan(this);
    }
};

Another option could be to iterate over all ClickableSpan instances and remove them all, such as:

    SpannableString str = (SpannableString)textView.getText();
    for (ClickableSpan span : str.getSpans(0, str.length(), ClickableSpan.class))
        str.removeSpan(span);

For some reason that I cannot fathom, the documentation for spans is really poor... they are quite powerful!