How to detect emoticons in EditText in android

Question

I want to detect whether my EditText contains smilie (emoticons) or not. But I have no idea that how to detect them.

Answer 1

To disable emoji characters when typing on the keyboard I using the following filter:

InputFilter filter = new InputFilter() {
    @Override
    public CharSequence filter(CharSequence source, int start, int end, Spanned dest, int dstart, int dend) {
        for (int i = start; i < end; i++) {
            int type = Character.getType(source.charAt(i));
            //System.out.println("Type : " + type);
            if (type == Character.SURROGATE || type == Character.OTHER_SYMBOL) {
                return "";
            }
        }
        return null;
    }
};

mMessageEditText.setFilters(new InputFilter[]{filter});

If you need only detect if EditText contains any emoji character you can use this priciple (Character.getType()) in android.text.TextWatcher interface implementation (in onTextChange() or afterTextChanged() method) or e.g. use simple for cycle on mMessageEditText.getText() (returns CharSequence class) with charAt() method.

Answer 2

If by simile you are referring to the figure of speech, you can use .getText() and the String method .contains(String) to check whether it contains the Strings "like" or "as".

Snippet:

EditText myEditText = (EditText)findViewById(R.id.myEditText);
String input = myEditText.getText();
if(input.contains("like") || input.contains("as"))
{
    //code
}