How to center icon and text in a android button with width set to "fill parent"

Question

I want to have an Android Button with icon+text centered inside it. I'm using the drawableLeft attribute to set the image, this works well if the button has a width of "wrap_content" but I need to stretch to max width so I use width "fill_parent". This moves my icon straight to the left of the button and I want both icon and text centered inside the button.

I've try setting up the padding but this only allows to give a fixed value so it is not what I need. I need to have icon+text aligned in the center.

<Button 
    android:id="@+id/startTelemoteButton" 
    android:text="@string/start_telemote"
    android:drawableLeft="@drawable/start"
    android:paddingLeft="20dip"
    android:paddingRight="20dip"            
    android:width="fill_parent"
    android:heigh="wrap_content" />

Any suggestions on how I could achieve that?

Answer 1

android:drawableLeft is always keeping android:paddingLeft as a distance from the left border. When the button is not set to android:width="wrap_content", it will always hang to the left!

With Android 4.0 (API level 14) you can use android:drawableStart attribute to place a drawable at the start of the text. The only backward compatible solution I've come up with is using an ImageSpan to create a Text+Image Spannable:

Button button = (Button) findViewById(R.id.button);
Spannable buttonLabel = new SpannableString(" Button Text");
buttonLabel.setSpan(new ImageSpan(getApplicationContext(), R.drawable.icon,      
    ImageSpan.ALIGN_BOTTOM), 0, 1, Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
button.setText(buttonLabel);

In my case I needed to also adjust the android:gravity attribute of the Button to make it look centered:

<Button
  android:id="@+id/button"
  android:layout_width="wrap_content"
  android:layout_height="wrap_content"
  android:minHeight="32dp"
  android:minWidth="150dp"
  android:gravity="center_horizontal|top" />