Android: how to move marquee in the same direction as the text

Question

I would like my marquee to move from right to left when it contains a text in a left-to-right locale (like western languages), and left to right when it contains right-to-left locale (like hebrew or arabic). I found other questions bout textview marquee direction, with all kinds of hacks but without the connection to the locale writing. Normally this should be filed as a bug to Google...

Answer 1

You can check if the user's language is RTL or not. There is different ways to achieve this. It looks like BidiFormatter added recently in the Compatibility Package looks like a simple option. You can then set the marquee programatically with setEllipsize

It should look something like this :

if (bidiFormatter.isRtlContext()) {
   textView.setEllipsize(TextUtils.TruncateAt.BEGIN);
} else {
   textView.setEllipsize(TextUtils.TruncateAt.END);
}