Develop Reference

Apostrophe converting to question mark in textview

I am parsing some external XML into an object and displaying this inside a textview.
Apostrophe's/single quotes are being converted to these silly question mark symbols.
Nothing i've found is working - i've tried using replaceall and escaping it with \', it doesn't give me the desired result.
I've tried setting the textview using:
tv.setText(Html.fromHtml(news_item.getTitle()));
It doesn't seem to work, I can't find any other solutions to this one, your ideas appreciated.

Try this:
tv.setText(news_item.getTitle().replaceAll("\u2019", "'"));
For other Unicode characters, please see this link.

Found it!
The mark you are looking for is called RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK with a unicode code of U+2019. This particular mark should be replaced via:
String.replace("’", "’");
for proper display.
If that doesn't work, you should do a substitution from that mark to a apostrophe via:
String.replace("’", "'");
or directly:
String.replace("’", "'");
to make sure the display actually displays it.
Close up of the difference between right single quotation mark vs apostrophe: ’ vs '

The documented solution will work, but it is not the right way of fixing this, as the root cause of the problem is encoding. In your case, the source's (XML document) encoding is most likely UTF-8 or some other multi-byte encoding. Your parser or consumer of the data is most likely ISO-8859-1 or ASCII. These characters (right/left apostrophes) are not part of that character set. Therefore, the correct solution is to change the encoding of your parser/processor/consumer to UTF-8.
If this is not the case, then it is probably the opposite. You have a process that writes down characters in UTF-8, but the XML's encoding is not compatible (i.e. ISO-8859-1).
Remember this: ALL characters in ISO-8859-1 are mapped in UTF-8, but not the other way around. So going from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 is not a problem. The problem is when you have to make the round trip to ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. When converting UTF-8 characters, those characters NOT in the ISO character set, will show up funny on your display; either as question marks or "’

How can I put utf-16 characters in Android string resource?

I want to use Emojis in my app's strings. All strings reside, of course, in strings.xml
The problem is that not all Emojis are 16 bit friendly. Some Emojis can be represented as "normal" 16 bit hex: '\u26FF' but some are 32 bit hexes (UTF-16), usually represented as: '\x1F600'. I have no problem dealing with those inside the app, in code. But the strings.xml resource file is UTF8 encoded, and does not deal properly with non 16 bit escape chars.
I tried using '\x1F600' - because I saw that '\u26FF' works just fine. But it seems not to devour the 'x' escape char. Nor did it like the regexp notation '\x{1F600}'
So I ended up using a string placeholder '%1$s' and filling in the Emoji in code like this:
// greeting_3 is defined as: "hello there %1$s!"
String s = context.getString(R.string.greeting_3, "😜");
// OR:
String s = context.getString(R.string.greeting_3, new String(Character.toChars(0x1F61C)));
This is not a very elegant solution... is there a proper way to put 32 bit UTF-8 chars in strings.xml ?

But the strings.xml resource file is UTF8
If it's UTF-8 encoded, you can put your emojis directly. But then you risk that your editor or another piece of software destroys them.
If you are putting them in XML, you can try using XML entities: 😀, I'm not sure how well Android supports them though.
You can also use surrogate pairs: convert the emoji to UTF-16 and use standard \u escape. You can for example check out this page, it even tells you how to create a string litaral in Java: http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1F600/index.htm
😜 → U+1F600 → "\uD83D\uDE00"

The easiest way it just copying and pasting the emoji, it works from Android Studio 3.0 and newer

Add the resource like follows:
<string name="string_title">This is a emoji example <U+1F642></string>
In Android Studio 3.0 you can copy and paste an emoji:
And here how it looks:

Special characters such as PI, or subscripts on the xml of Android

I am coding a maths app and I want to show special characters such as PI, E, or subscripts and all those things.
I want to show them on the xml file of the layout.
How can I do it?
Thank you guys for all!

You can use the Unicode value for the symbol, preceded by \u. For example, the pi character is "\u03C0"

This site: http://www.dionysia.org/html/entities/symbols.html has list of elements which can be used in xml. Just watch the second element. For example:
square = &#8730
THen you need to conver it. For example:
String symbol = Html.fromHtml(square);
Alternative link is here: http://www.hrupin.com/2011/12/how-to-put-some-special-math-symbols-in-textview-editview-or-other-android-ui-element

The characters in a string resource are unicode. You can include special characters using the \unnnn notation.
There are many places to look up the unicode values on the web. Google found this one for me:
http://inamidst.com/stuff/unidata/

Android Replace "..." with ellipsis character

Since AVD tools 16 I'm getting this warning:
Replace "..." with ellipsis character (..., …) ?
in my strings.xml
at this line
<string name="searching">Searching...</string>
How do I replace ...? Is it just literally …?
Could someone explain this encoding?

… is the unicode for "…" so just replace it. It's better to have it as one char/symbol than three dots.

To make thing short just put … in place ...
Link to XML character Entities List
Look at Unicode column of HTML for row named hellip

If you're using Eclipse then you can always do the following:
Right click on the warning
Select "Quick Fix" (shortcut is Ctrl + 1 by default)
Select "Replace with suggested characters"
This should replace your three dots with the proper Unicode character for ellipsis.
Just a note: The latest version of ADT (21.1) sometimes won't do the replace operation properly, but earlier versions had no problem doing this.
This is the character: …

The solution to your problem is:
Go to Window -> Preferences -> Android -> Lint Error Checking
And search for "ellipsis". Change the warning level to "Info" or "Ignore".

This answer is indirectly related to this question:
In my case textView1.setTextView("done&#8230"); was showing some box/chinese character. Later, I checked into fileformat.info for what the value represents and I found this is a Han character.
So, what to do? I searched for "fileformat.info ellipse character" and then everything became clear to me once I saw its values are;
UTF-16 (hex) 0x2026 (2026)
UTF-16 (decimal) 8,230
So, you have several encoding available to represent a character (e.g. 10 in Decimal is represented as A in hexa) so it is very important to know when you are writing an unicode character, how receiving function decodes it. If it decodes as decimal value then you have to provide decimal value, if it accept hexadecimal then you have to provide hexadecimal.
In my case, setTextView() function accepts decimal encoded value but I was providing hexadecimal values so I was getting wrong character.

The quick fix shortcut in Android Studio is Alt + Enter by default.

Best not to ignore it as suggested by some, it seems to me. Use Android Studio to correct it (rather than actually typing in the character code), and the tool will replace the three dots with the three-dot unicode character. Won't be confusing to translators etc.

How to put Hebrew character in Android JAVA file?

For Android Platform:
I need to put Hebrew Character ₪ and some more like אורנג in string to check with the incoming data in java file. When I put this character It shows an error like "Some characters can not be mapped using "Cp1252" character encoding. Either change the encoding or remove the characters which are not supported by the "Cp1252" character encoding". These values are coming from SQLite database. Please see the attached snap. How can I solve this? Kindly give me some useful suggestions. Looking forward to hear from anybody who has a suggestion for me. Thanks.

Please open your eclipse.ini file from your eclipse folder with Note Pad and put the following permission into that.
-Dfile.encoding = UTF-8
Some more options as well:
For setting the encoding on a per WorkSpace basis, use Preferences->General->Workspace
To set the encoding on a per project basis open project properties and change to UTF-8
Hope this one help.

I think you'll need UTF-8 encoding for that.
These things are a little bit confusing. Reading this might clear some of the mist around encodings and character sets.

I think this may useful to you.
Keep this hebrew word in string.xml file. You can retrieve as
in String.xml
place hebrew word here
In java code:
String s=getString(R.string.hebrew_word);
Use this string as you want..