Nonbreaking colon in Android

I have the following line of text: address:345346943693495349534963 I want this line to always break like this (exact breaking point is not important but it should not be a colon):

address:3453469436934
95349534963

On my Android 4.2.2 device it breaks as above, but on Android 6.0 emulator it behaves differently:

address:
345346943693495349534963

How do I make a breaking behavior consistent across all devices?

I get different results when I draw a text on canvas, here's the code (in Scala):

def paint = {
    val newPaint = new TextPaint(Paint.ANTI_ALIAS_FLAG)
    newPaint setTextSize getResources.getDimensionPixelSize(R.dimen.text_size)
    newPaint setTypeface Typeface.create("Droid Sans", Typeface.NORMAL)
    newPaint setTextAlign Paint.Align.CENTER
    newPaint setStyle Paint.Style.FILL
    newPaint setColor Color.BLACK
    newPaint
}

def drawText(canvas: Canvas, text: String, x: Float, baseY: Float) = {
    val layout = new StaticLayout(text, paint, textBounds, ALIGN_NORMAL, 1.0f, 0.0f, false)
    val y = baseY - layout.getHeight / 2f

    canvas.save
    canvas.translate(x, y)
    layout draw canvas
    canvas.restore
}

drawText(canvas, gText, bitmap.getWidth / 2, topSize / 2)

Solution

It looks like you are looking for the Word Joiner unicode codepoint https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_joiner

It's also know as Zero Width no-break space (ZWNBSP).

According to this other question: Zero-width line breaking space for Android

it should be supported on Android since version 5 (Lollipop). The same goes for soft-hypen (suggested in PhilLab response).

I would suggest you to try it out, you can write it as  in the XML resource string. Put it between the colon and the number.

If it doesn't work before Lollipop and you need support for previous platform the only other thing I can think about is measuring the text, character by character and, knowing the available width of your view (which you have to compute separately), manually add a new line in the text where you want it to split.

You can see how the Text measurement works in Android by reading this article: https://chris.banes.me/2014/03/27/measuring-text/

Maybe there's a way to do it using Spans too, but I'm not aware of any.