highlight text inside a textview

To highlight all occurrences of specific text use this method:

private void highlightString(String input) {
//Get the text from text view and create a spannable string
SpannableString spannableString = new SpannableString(mTextView.getText());
//Get the previous spans and remove them
BackgroundColorSpan[] backgroundSpans = spannableString.getSpans(0, spannableString.length(), BackgroundColorSpan.class);

for (BackgroundColorSpan span: backgroundSpans) {
    spannableString.removeSpan(span);
}

//Search for all occurrences of the keyword in the string
int indexOfKeyword = spannableString.toString().indexOf(input);

while (indexOfKeyword > 0) {
    //Create a background color span on the keyword
    spannableString.setSpan(new BackgroundColorSpan(Color.YELLOW), indexOfKeyword, indexOfKeyword + input.length(), Spanned.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);

    //Get the next index of the keyword
    indexOfKeyword = spannableString.toString().indexOf(input, indexOfKeyword + input.length());
}

//Set the final text on TextView
mTextView.setText(spannableString);}

Note: mTextView is a TextView object in which you want to highlight your text

You probably want to use a SpannableString for this, which allows individual parts of a string to be rendered differently in a TextView.

Like so:

    SpannableString str = new SpannableString("Highlighted. Not highlighted.");
    str.setSpan(new BackgroundColorSpan(Color.YELLOW), 0, 11, 0);
    textView.setText(str);

Easy Way

You can use Spannable class for formatting Text.

textView.setText("Hello, I am Awesome, Most Awesome"); // set text first
setHighLightedText(textView, "a"); // highlight all `a` in TextView

Output will be something like below image.

Here is the method.

 /**
     * use this method to highlight a text in TextView
     *
     * @param tv              TextView or Edittext or Button (or derived from TextView)
     * @param textToHighlight Text to highlight
     */
    public void setHighLightedText(TextView tv, String textToHighlight) {
        String tvt = tv.getText().toString();
        int ofe = tvt.indexOf(textToHighlight, 0);
        Spannable wordToSpan = new SpannableString(tv.getText());
        for (int ofs = 0; ofs < tvt.length() && ofe != -1; ofs = ofe + 1) {
            ofe = tvt.indexOf(textToHighlight, ofs);
            if (ofe == -1)
                break;
            else {
                // set color here
                wordToSpan.setSpan(new BackgroundColorSpan(0xFFFFFF00), ofe, ofe + textToHighlight.length(), Spannable.SPAN_EXCLUSIVE_EXCLUSIVE);
                tv.setText(wordToSpan, TextView.BufferType.SPANNABLE);
            }
        }
    }

You can check this answer for clickable highlighted text.