Highlighting Text Color using Html.fromHtml() in Android?

Using color value from xml resource:

int labelColor = getResources().getColor(R.color.label_color);
String сolorString = String.format("%X", labelColor).substring(2); // !!strip alpha value!!

Html.fromHtml(String.format("<font color=\"#%s\">text</font>", сolorString), TextView.BufferType.SPANNABLE); 

Or far simpler than dealing with Spannables manually, since you didn't say that you want the background highlighted, just the text:

String styledText = "This is <font color='red'>simple</font>.";
textView.setText(Html.fromHtml(styledText), TextView.BufferType.SPANNABLE);

Alternative solution: Using a WebView instead. Html is easy to work with.

WebView webview = new WebView(this);

String summary = "<html><body>Sorry, <span style=\"background: red;\">Madonna</span> gave no results</body></html>";

webview.loadData(summary, "text/html", "utf-8");

This can be achieved using a Spannable String. You will need to import the following

import android.text.SpannableString; 
import android.text.style.BackgroundColorSpan; 
import android.text.style.StyleSpan;

And then you can change the background of the text using something like the following:

TextView text = (TextView) findViewById(R.id.text_login);
text.setText("");
text.append("Your text here");
Spannable sText = (Spannable) text.getText();
sText.setSpan(new BackgroundColorSpan(Color.RED), 1, 4, 0);

Where this will highlight the charecters at pos 1 - 4 with a red color. Hope this helps!