How to force the Android Mobile keyboard to numbers?

Specifically, how do I get it to pop up as the numbers entry screen but still be able to switch to letters? What I'd really like, ideally, is to have it act the same as if we had the xml property

<EditText
    ...
    android:inputType="textShortMessage"/>

but co开发者_如何学Gome up on the number entry screen (the one you get by clicking "?123") on first showing, rather than the usual qwerty one. I've tried doing eg

<EditText
    ...
    android:inputType="textShortMessage|number"/>

but all that does is default it to the phone-number-entry screen with no option to enter letters. Any ideas?

In Java code, use:

edittext.setRawInputType(InputType.TYPE_CLASS_NUMBER);

This discussion seems to indicate that you can use:

android:inputType="number"

to achieve what you are looking for. But I think the poster of that solution may have misunderstood the problem, as I believe that "number" will only allow (of course) numbers, and not allow letters. I am not able to test this at the moment, so I will have to speculate.

Alternately, you could have two EditTexts for your input: one EditText strictly numeric, and the other plain text, such that you could enter a quantity in the first field and a unit in the second field. I'm guessing that you are eventually parsing the input as a string anyhow, and in that case all you would have to do is concatenate the text before parsing.