How to highlight part of the text with background color while preserving text wrapping in WinUI 3?

Question

I am working on a WinUI 3 application and need to display a line of text where only a portion of the text has a colored background (like a highlight). The requirement is:

The text should wrap exactly like a normal Run inside a TextBlock (i.e., smooth, inline wrapping).

The highlighted part should have a background color behind the text.

I know that Run and Span elements in WinUI 3 do not support a background property.

Using RichTextBlock with InlineUIContainer works for background but breaks the natural text wrapping behavior (especially with longer text).

I want to avoid splitting the text into multiple TextBlocks or losing inline wrapping.

Is there a built-in or custom control approach to achieve this in WinUI 3?

<TextBlock Style="{StaticResource DefaultTextBlockStyle}" FontWeight="{Binding FontWeight}" LineHeight="30" Visibility="{Binding ItemVisibility}">
    <Run Text="{Binding DisplayLabel}" Foreground="{Binding LabelForeground}"/>
    <Run Text="{Binding Value}" Foreground="{Binding ForegroundBrush}" FontWeight="{Binding ValueFontWeight}"/>
</TextBlock>

I have used the app code to display label and value, except the background part everything is working fine.

Expected Out:

Label and Value should be in the same line , Value exceeds the available width it should wrap into nextline and Value should have a background.

Andrew KeepCoding · Accepted Answer · 2025-09-23 12:09:06Z

1

I created the AK.Toolkit.WinUI3.TextBlockEx for this. You can see how it's implemented in the GitHub repo here or you can just install the NuGet package and use it like this:

<StackPanel VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center" Width="155">
    <ak:TextBlockEx
        Text="Label : This is a very very very very long value"
        HighlightingText="This is a very very very very long value"
        TextHighlightBackground="{ThemeResource AccentFillColorDefaultBrush}"
        TextHighlightForeground="{ThemeResource TextControlForeground}" />
</StackPanel>

will render:

answered Sep 23 at 12:09

Andrew KeepCoding

15.4k2 gold badges25 silver badges40 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

2 Comments

Bevara Satyasairam Sep 30 at 5:57

This solved my use case. Thank you :). I have extended the capabilities for your control by adding support for fontweights(fontweights can be applied to different substrings), and also by allowing comma-separated strings to be passed to the HighlightingText property to apply highlights for multiple substrings. How can I share you this?

Andrew KeepCoding Sep 30 at 6:04

In the repo would be great. Feedback is always appreciated!

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

How to highlight part of the text with background color while preserving text wrapping in WinUI 3?

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

1 Answer 1

2 Comments

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Post as a guest

Related