In `Text` composable, if word does not fit in the ...

# compose

[K Merle]

In Text composable, if word does not fit in the line, it goes to the next line. Is it possible to still leave the word in the same line and have that hard break of the word? Example:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the 
printing and typesetting industry. Lore
m Ipsum has been the industry's standar
d dummy text ever since the 1500s.

[Zach Klippenstein (he/him) [MOD]]

We’re in the process of designing a line breaking API, but as of right now i don’t believe there’s any way to get the Text composable to do this.

[K Merle]

Seems like replacing white space char, with a no-line-break characters does the trick of keeping text in a same line (example above).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character

[Rick Regan]

I have been doing this and it works well. I put a “\uFEFF” after characters like space, period, and forward slash.

Check out this feature request I wrote in Jan 2021 (and star if you like 😀).

[Alex Vanyo]

That’s a neat trick:

val sourceText = "Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s."
val modifiedText = sourceText.toList().joinToString("\u200B")
Text(modifiedText)

[Rick Regan]

If I use " \u200B" instead of "\uFEFF" in my code I don’t get the non-breaking behavior.

[Alex Vanyo]

Is the space there intentional?

[Alex Vanyo]

\uFEFF also works for me, although the Wikipedia article says that one is deprecated?

[Alex Vanyo]

\u2060 also works. I’m just trying all of these out for fun, not sure how supported this is or if this is a reasonable approach. There’s also TransformedText and VisualTransformation, which might be the correct thing to do for something like this

[Rick Regan]

The space was part of my quick and dirty test to replace space with space+non-breaking space (I neglected to remove it before I pasted it here).

[Rick Regan]

I did not know \uFEFF was deprecated! (Thanks.) Maybe I will switch to \u2060, which appears to works as well.

[Rick Regan]

What’s interesting is that sometime in the last year and a half plus that I’ve been using Compose the forward slash and the period no longer cause a line break without the non-breaking space (if we weren’t playing around with it right now I never would have known). I wonder what could have changed?

I have a restricted set of special characters that my Text uses, and at the time I experimented with all of them (a left or right parenthesis, for example, never caused a problem — and still don’t). Space, period, and forward slash were the three that I needed to insert the non-breaking space after. Now it appears only space requires it.

(I don’t know that I would remove the code in my app that inserts them, just to be safe — unless I got a definitive reason why the behavior changed.)

[Rick Regan]

And thanks — I will look into TransformedText as the better way to do this.

[K Merle]

@Rick Regan Have you by any chance been adding hyphens at the end of lines?
I've been experimenting yesterday, and can't make it perfect for now.

[Siyamed]

I didn't understand the problem/question :/
Is the screenshot desired or non-desired output?

[Siyamed]

I don't think in conpose line breaking changed intentionally. It might be android usage and some tricks we played on staticlayout having a side effect.

[K Merle]

@Siyamed Code block was a desired output.

[Rick Regan]

K Merle: I have not used hyphens (they’re not part of my limited input characters).

[Rick Regan]

Siyamed: The desired behavior in this case is only line-breaking forced by the end of the Text. The use of the non-breaking space for the few problematic symbols was how I dealt with it. Having fewer symbols to account for is better in some sense, but still I’d like to know if it’s a bug or a feature.

I’ll see if I can figure out when it changed (I’m on the latest Compose and Material 3 currently, and API 33 for that matter).

[Siyamed]

Got it. The need is allow break at letter boundaries instead of words.

[Rick Regan]

And in my case specifically, the “words” are numeric expressions, and the “letters” are digits and symbols.

[Rick Regan]

After looking into it I think it was my code that changed (Text width) and not line breaking behavior of forward slash and period. Sorry for the false alarm.