Remove Underline from Clickable text in TextView on Android

Been working with the Android SDK (v 2.2) lately and needed to a clickable text area in an TextView but one without any underlined links (so it doesn’t appear like a hyperlink). I also wanted to capture the click event and launch my own Activity within the same Activty, rather than use something as complicated as Linkify for this use case.

This example builds the text value for a TextView component dynamically using a SpannableStringBuilder. To create the span for a given length of text, I created a custom class file that extends ClickableSpan. This custom class overrides the the “updateDrawState” method and removes the underline. This seems pretty straight forward, but it was not easy assembling all the pieces from various examples to get the results I desired.

Here is a image preview of the application output:

Full Code: https://gist.github.com/249970d811d84a529d37.