How to set the text color of TextView in code?

Question

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?

Answer 1

You should use:

holder.text.setTextColor(Color.RED);

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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.

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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.