android - Live character count for EditText

Question

I was wondering what the best way to do a live character count of an edit-text box is in Android. I was looking at this but I couldn't seem to make any sense of it.

To describe the problem, I have an EditText and I'm trying to limit the characters to 150. I can do this with an input filter, however I want to show right below the text box the number of characters a user has entered(Almost like stack overflow is doing right now).

If someone could write a small snippet of example code or point me in the right direction I'd appreciate it a lot.

Answer 1

you can use a TextWatcher to see when the text has changed

private TextView mTextView;
private EditText mEditText;
private final TextWatcher mTextEditorWatcher = new TextWatcher() {
        public void beforeTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start, int count, int after) {
        }

        public void onTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start, int before, int count) {
           //This sets a textview to the current length
           mTextView.setText(String.valueOf(s.length()));
        }

        public void afterTextChanged(Editable s) {
        }
};

you set the TextWatcher for the edittext with

mEditText.addTextChangedListener(mTextEditorWatcher);