This is an old and already accepted question, however I am sure that the problem can be solved in more elegant way by using javascript.
Keep the html file in your assets folder and surround the text which you want to replace into with div elements with unique id's.
<html>
<head> ... <head>
<body>
Static text
<div id="replace1">replace me</div>
<div id="replace2">replace me too</div>
More static text ...
</body>
</html>
Now create a javascript function which will replace the innerHtml of a div with an id:
function replace(id, newContent)
{
document.getElementById(id).innerHTML = newContent;
}
This function will be best placed directly in the html file, update the <head> section to look like this:
<head>
...
<script type="text/javascript">
function replace(id, newContent)
{
document.getElementById(id).innerHTML = newContent;
}
</script>
</head>
Now we need to call the javascript function from from the WebView Android api:
WebView helpView = (WebView)findViewById(R.id.helpView);
helpView.getSettings().setJavaScriptEnabled(true);
helpView.setWebViewClient(new WebViewClient() {
@Override
public void onPageFinished(WebView view, String url) {
super.onPageFinished(view, url);
view.loadUrl("javascript:replace('replace1', 'new content 1')");
view.loadUrl("javascript:replace('replace2', 'new content 2')");
}
});
helpView.loadUrl("file:///android_asset/help.html");
Using this you will avoid reading potentially large data into memory and running expensive operations on it unnecessarily.