Can I limit TextView's number of characters?

What I have now is a ListView of TextView elements. each TextView element displays a text (the text length varies from 12 words to 100+). What I want is to make these TextViews display a portion of the text (let's say 20 word or roughly 170 chars).

How to limit the TextView to a fixed number of characters?

Here is an example. I limit the sizewith the maxLength attribute, limit it to a single line with maxLines attribute, then use the ellipsize=end to add a "..." automatically to the end of any line that has been cut-off.

<TextView 
    android:id="@+id/secondLineTextView" 
    android:layout_width="wrap_content"
    android:layout_height="wrap_content" 
    android:maxLines="1" 
    android:maxLength="10" 
    android:ellipsize="end"/>

If your not interested in xml solutions maybe you can do this:

String s="Hello world";
Textview someTextView;
someTextView.setText(getSafeSubstring(s, 5));
//the text of someTextView will be Hello

...

public String getSafeSubstring(String s, int maxLength){
  if(!TextUtils.isEmpty(s)){
    if(s.length() >= maxLength){
      return s.substring(0, maxLength);
    }
  }
  return s;
}