Constraint Layout

<TextViewandroid:id="@+id/some_textview"android:layout_width="0dp"android:layout_height="wrap_content"app:layout_constraintLeft_toLeftOf="@id/textview_above"app:layout_constraintRight_toLeftOf="@id/button_to_right"/>

• Ensure your layout width is zero
• left / right constraints are defined
• layout height of wrap_content allows expansion up/down.
• Set android:maxLines="2" to prevent vertical expansion (2 is just an e.g.)
• Ellipses are prob. a good idea with max lines android:ellipsize="end"

0dp width allows left/right constraints to determine how wide your widget is.

Setting left/right constraints sets the actual width of your widget, within which your text will wrap.

Constraint Layout docs

For me this issue only occurred on Android < 4.0

The combination of parameters I used were:

android:layout_weight="1"android:ellipsize="none"android:maxLines="100"android:scrollHorizontally="false"

The maxLines count seemed to be the random final piece that made my TextView wrap.

For the case where the TextView is inside a TableLayout, the solution is to set android:shrinkColumns="1" on the TableLayout. (Replace 1 with the column number the TextView you want to wrap is in. (0-indexed))

AFAICT, no other attributes are needed on the TextView.

For other cases, see the other answers here.

FWIW, I had initially gotten it to sort of work with

 <TextView   android:id="@+id/inventory_text"   android:layout_width="fill_parent"   android:layout_weight="1"   android:width="0dp"

but that resulted in some extra empty space at the bottom of the Dialog it was all in.