programmatically set edit text hint in android?

is there a way to set the text hint displayed inside of an android edittext with java? I would like for my app to be able to display different things in the edittext at different times, thanks in advance

11 Answers

Did you try the setHint?

myTextView.setHint("My conditional hint"); 

Hope it helps..

If you are using simple Editext without TextInputLayout :

EditText etUsername; etUsername = (EditText) findViewById(R.id.etUsername); etUsername.setHint("Your Hint"); 

If you are using Editext within TextInputLayout then you need to change property of TextInputLayout not Edittext:

TextInputLayout layoutUser; layoutUser = (TextInputLayout) findViewById(R.id.inputLayoutUname); layoutUser.setHint(getResources().getString(R.string.hintFaculty)); 

Call setHint() on the EditText.

((TextView) findViewById(R.id.yourEditTextId)).setHint("hint text"); 

Kotlin

editText.hint = "Your hint" 

if you are using actionbarsherlock searchview, this is the best way to set string dynamically

 AutoCompleteTextView searchTextView = (AutoCompleteTextView) mSearchView.findViewById(R.id.abs__search_src_text); searchTextView.setHint(getResources().getString(R.string.search)); 

for editText.hint you must delete name of your edit.Text from activity_main.xml then set in the MainActivity in java or activity_main.xml because text is preferred to hint.

 <EditText android:id="@+id/text" android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:inputType="textMultiLine|textLongMessage" android:hint="\n"/> 

To be honest I don´t understand why.. but including "\n" as hint in the xml did the trick!

Now you can call setHint from Java code:

searchEditText.setHint(getString(R.string.search_hint)); 

and remove the \n from strings.xml if you want to allow the text split automatically according to the room

<string name="search_hint">keyword, location, max price (e.g. 1K, 1M)</string> 

In Kotlin

val layoutMobile: TextInputLayout = findViewById<View>(R.id.inputLayout_MobileNumber) as TextInputLayout layoutMobile.hint = "Your Hint" 

in Java

yourEditTex.setText("");//First yourEditTex.hit("Your text"); 

this for alls cases.

You can try following,

in Java

yourEditText.setHint("hint"); 

in Kotlin

yourEditText.hint = "Your hint"