Develop Reference

Best Way to store and render Unicode Emojis in Android

i have a simple Memory Game as Project. For the Memory Tiles I wanted to use Emojis. I tried to use it that way:
emojiCard.setText(new String(Character.toChars(Integer.parseInt(1F60D, 16))));
now I just have to save 1F60D to a variable and can show the emoji.
that works for simple emojis but I cannot use the "new" ones because then i have to use surrogate pairs and I don't know how to do this.
Is there a better way ? like saving the unicode ?
sorry i'am really new to android development and tried already a lot of things.
Thanks.

Integer.parseInt() takes a String as input, so presumably you meant to say Integer.parseInt("1F60D", 16) instead. Which would be wasted overhead when you can simply pass a numeric 0x1F60D literal to Character.toChars() instead.
Java strings use UTF-16 encoding. When encoded to UTF-16, codepoint U+1F60D uses surrogate pairs, so surrogates is not your issue.
Assuming you are referring to how newer emojis support modifiers (to change their genders, colors, etc), then that has nothing to do with surrogates. You simply append the modifier codepoint(s) you want after the base emoji codepoint. For example:
emojiCard.setText(new String(Character.toChars(0x1F466)) + new String(Character.toChars(0x1F3FE)));
(👦 + 🏾 = 👦🏾)

How to describe duration in Android?

I'm writing small app and I need to write duration of sport event in i18n. Im using PrettyTime library for date, but when I attempt to use DateUtils or PrettyTime, I have issues..
For example I want to say that duration is 2 minutes. I need some way to pass it to library which supports i18n and accept milliseconds and return Chars.
In android we have:
com.android.internal.R.plurals.duration_minutes
But I can't access to it from my App. Is there any way to make it using correct way and not writing own plurals for all languages?
Thank you

I am not sure which issues you are talking about in context of Android-DateUtils and PrettyTime-library. But I know for sure that Android-DateUtils does not perfectly manage the plural rules of various languages (especially not slavish languages or arabic because it only knows singular and one plural form which is too simple). See for example this Android-issue. About the PrettyTime-library, the same objection is valid if you consider Arabic - see the source.
My recommendation:
Try out my library Time4A (a new AAR-library). Then you can use this code to process a millisecond-input and to produce a localized minute-string:
// input
long millis = 1770123;
// create a duration
Duration<ClockUnit> duration = Duration.of(millis, ClockUnit.MILLIS);
// normalization to (rounded) minutes
duration = duration.with(ClockUnit.MINUTES.rounded());
String s = PrettyTime.of(Locale.ENGLISH).print(duration, TextWidth.WIDE);
System.out.println(s); // 30 minutes
Example for Korean (answer to comment of #Gabe Sechan):
String s = PrettyTime.of(new Locale("ko")).print(duration, TextWidth.WIDE);
System.out.println(s); // 30분 (korean translation of "30 minutes")
Example for Arabic (right to left):
String s = PrettyTime.of(new Locale("ar")).print(duration, TextWidth.WIDE);
System.out.println(s); // ٣٠ دقيقة
This solution currently supports ~90 languages (more than in PrettyTime-library) and three text widths (full, abbreviated or narrow). Accurate pluralization handling is automatically included. Time4A uses its own language resources based on CLDR-data (independent from Android). But you are free to override those resources by defining your own assets (in UTF-8).
About normalization: I just showed the variant which you have described in your question. However, there are many more ways how to normalize durations in Time4A(J). This page will give you more ideas how to use that feature.
If you still miss some languages then just tell me, and I will support it in the next versions of Time4A. Currently supported languages can be found in the tutorial.

Changing text input to also treat "u" as "ü", "ss" as "ß", etc. for word suggestions

I have the following idea:
In German we have four extra letters (ä, ö, ü, ß) and I don't know any other language which has these vocals but I think French people with their accents also know this problem. We have a lot of apps in the Google Play store for cities, bus stations, trains and other stuff like that. Now it is really exhausting that we always have to write these letters if we are on the go. It would be much easier to write Munchen (=München [de] = Munich [en]), Osterreich (Österreich [de] = Austria [en]) or something like Uberwasserstrasse (Überwasserstraße [de] = Over-Water-Street [en]). So my question is now:
A lot of apps show suggestions for our just typed word. I think in the code it is something like this:
String current = editText.getText().toString();
db.lookUp(current); // Of course SQL statement
Can we hook this so that Android thinks that we have typed an ä, ö, ü, ß if we write an a, o, u, ss and the system looks for words with one of these vowels and suggests both? Here I do not want to ask for code - I want to discuss if we are able to write a hack or hook for the Android system. Also, root-rights can be assumed with the solution. I'm looking forward to your ideas.

You could do this the other way around, by "normalizing" typed characters into their related non-diacritical versions. You can use the java.Text.Normalizer class for this. A good snippet can be found in this article:
public static String removeAccents(String text) {
return text == null ? null :
Normalizer.normalize(text, Form.NFD)
.replaceAll("\\p{InCombiningDiacriticalMarks}+", "");
}
When applied to "Münich", this returns "Munich". That way, you can use a simple string comparison using these normalized versions.
This wouldn't work for "ß" though. If that's the only special case, you could handle it separately.

What you are looking for is called accent-insensitive collating sequence. SQLite's COLLATE operator can be used to do such searches, but I learned from another post that there might be bugs you'll need to look out for.

Android: converting between Strings, SpannedStrings and Spannablestrings

I have a string resource called "foo". It may be a simple string... or it may contain HTML. This may change over time: I should be able to box it up as at least a SpannableString immediately upon reading whether it's HTML or not (but how??)
I want to get that raw CharSequence and first be able to display it as-is (the exact characters, not Android's "interpretation" of it). Right now I can't do that... toString() decides to rip out the parts it doesn't think I want to see.
I'd then like to be able to create a SpannableString from this and other Strings or SpannableStrings via concatenation using some method (none of the normal ones work). I'd like to then use that SpannableString to display the HTML-formatted text in a TextView.
This shouldn't be difficult, but clearly I'm not doing it right (there's very little info out there about this that I've found so far). Surely there is a way to accurately interconvert between between Strings, SpannedStrings and even Spannablestrings, without losing the markups along the way?
Note that I've already played with the somewhat broken Linkify, but I want better control over the process (no dangling unformatted "/"s, proper hrefs, etc.) I can get this all to work IF I stay in HTML at all steps, though I can't concatenate anything.
Edit 1: I've learned I can use the following to always ensure I get my raw string (instead of whatever Android decides it thinks the CharSequence really is). Nice... now, how to coax this into a SpannableString?
<string name="foo"><![CDATA[
<b>Some bold</b>
]]>
</string>
Edit 2: Not sure why this didn't work earlier, but... if foo1 and foo2 are strings marked up as above (as CDATA), then one can apparently do this:
String foo1 = (String)getResources().getText(R.string.foo1);
String foo2 = (String)getResources().getText(R.string.foo2);
SpannedString bar = new SpannedString(Html.fromHtml(foo1+foo2));
Curious: is there a more straightforward solution than this? Is this CDATA business actually necessary? It seems convoluted (but not as convoluted as never quite knowing what the resource type will be... String, Spannable, etc.)

I had the same problem. There are two solutions according to Google API Guides.
First is to escape < mark with < in the string resource. Unfortunately, String conversion removes the tag in the background.
Second is to use Format Strings instead of XML/HTML tags. It seems simpler, faster, and evades hidden conversion problems. getString(resource, ...) works like a printf(string, ...) here.
Both work and require some code to replace given part of the string anyway (handle tags or format strings). Enjoy! =)

It appears there isn't a more straightforward way to accomplish this.

in android application how to detect the occurence of substring in a text

I'm getting a text extracted from qrcode from my application, but as I am using zxing library its putting an extra DEMO at the end. How to remove it from there?
I was trying this but it does not work:
String aboutText = (Global.text).toString();
aboutText = aboutText.replace("DEMO", " ");

String.replace only takes chars as argument. Try String.replaceFirst(String, String) instead.
aboutText = aboutText.replaceFirst("DEMO", " ");
shout work. You can also take a look at replaceAll

Here you are: String. As for a newbie it will be quite helpful to learn more about strings in Java and the operations with them.