EditText: Differentiate between text change by setText() or by keyboard input

user_304266 0
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I have an EditText View which is edited by setText() from my code and by the user via (soft/hard) keyboard and - if possible by speech input. I want to handle input made by my code in another way than normal user input: if a user input happens, a internal event shall be fired. But I don't know how to differentiate between both. Previously - when developing on the emulator - I used the onKeyDown() method to catch user input. However, when testing on a real device, I found out, that onKeyDown() isn't triggered from soft keyboard input. Additionally speech input wouldn't be recognized by this, though I consider this to be a minor flaw. So that solution is no option for me.

On the other hand there is the onTextChanged() method, but this is triggered by both setText() and keyboard input. So how can I differentiate between both or which method is only called by user input, but not when using setText(), so can I overwrite it?

android-edittext input android
5 Answers

There are already a lot of good workarounds here! I wanted to add what worked for me to give options to whoever might be having this issue in the future.

I used the TextWatcher and simply relied on checking for what element currently has focus when the EditText is being edited. Note that this would work if in your app, the user has to give focus to the EditText (by clicking on it for instance) before entering a text, and you're sure that another element will have the focus when you're using setText in your code.

Something like this

yourEditText.addTextChangedListener(
            new TextWatcher() {
                @Override
                public void beforeTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start, int count, int after) {

                }

                @Override
                public void onTextChanged(CharSequence s, int start, int before, int count) {
                    if (yourEditText.hasFocus) {
                        //this is a user input
                    }
                }

                @Override
                public void afterTextChanged(Editable s) {

                }
            }
    );
user_75735460
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