Is there a way to force just a single character from the onscreen keyboard

I'd like to invoke the Android onscreen keyboard to just retrieve a single character. Is there a way to do this?

I am working on a hangman application and need to take input one character at a time. The plan is to have a text area for each guessed letter, and display the soft keyboard when the user selects a text area for whic开发者_如何学Ch to guess.

Wouldn't you just set the text area to only accept a single character and clear the current character if a new character is entered?