Hyphenation in Android Hyphenation in Android android android

Hyphenation in Android


Its a new thing from Android 6 Marshmellow.

Try adding this to your TextView xml

android:hyphenationFrequency="none"


Management of line breaks can be a hassle. The best option is to use UTF line-break modifier control characters since android supports full UTF

I know someone mentioned "soft-hyphen", but there are quite a few more.

You can also use the "Zero Width Space" between words on languages that lack spaces so you don't have to rely on dictionary interpretation. You can also use this as a soft-hyphen in languages that allow breaking of certain words over lines at certain points.

When using a compound word that you don't want broken, but you want the Text To Speech system to recognize it properly you should use "Word Separator" character. Don't use "Zero Width Non Breaking Space" as that has been deprecated due to it's use as BOM.

Finally, if you want a space but don't want a line break, use a simple non-breaking space.


Soft hyphen worked on a Samsung Galaxy device starting with Android 4.3.

<!-- key combination to enter soft hyphen: [Alt Gr]+[-] or [Alt]+240 on German PC, see https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weiches_Trennzeichen#Darstellung_auf_Computersystemen --><string name="no_connection">Nicht ver-bund-en</string>

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Since my use case was pretty narrow, I just used one soft hyphen in the word "verbunden". The Unicode \u00ad had no effect.