Use emoji in strings.xml with EmojiCompat support library

Question

I'm using the EmojiCompat support library to have emoji in my app, and I would like to have those emojis directly in the strings.xml file (ex: <string name="string_name">Some text \uD83E\uDD96</string>)

This works well for devices API>23 but otherwise it crash

A/art: art/runtime/check_jni.cc:65] JNI DETECTED ERROR IN APPLICATION: input is not valid Modified UTF-8: illegal start byte 0xf0
A/art: art/runtime/check_jni.cc:65]     string: 'Some text 🦖'
A/art: art/runtime/check_jni.cc:65]     in call to NewStringUTF
A/art: art/runtime/check_jni.cc:65]     from java.lang.String android.content.res.StringBlock.nativeGetString(long, int)

The only solution I have found is to get the emoji code in a java variable and put it at the end of my string (like the google sample) and it works on every version supported.

But I really want to put emoji code in the strings files and be able to do something like this :

emojiTextView.setText(getText(R.string.string_name));

Does anyone know how to achieve this ?

Answer 1

Its bit late to answer this question but still it may help you or someone else.

Use decimal value you emoji to add an emoji in strings.xml. This works well with Support Library as well.

In your case you want to display 🦖, it is T-REX (check here) and its decimal value is 🦖. Final string will be:

<string name="emoji">Some text &#129430;</string>

Output:

Answer 2

I faced this exact same issue in my app, I am not qualified to say how much this can limit your use of emojis in android in general, but I can say for certain that you can't add emojis to android xml files (without making your app crash, that is).

BUT, you can do a little hack to achieve this. Use This java static list of all emojis. In this you need to give the emoji name (emojiID) like "DOG_FACE" or "HONEY_BEE".

In your strings.xml file add these EmojiIds, but with in a tag form like: "##DOG_FACE##" or "##HONEY_BEE##" (For example : "Hi! how are you my man ##DOG_FACE##").

And make a method which takes the string's resource id as parameter and return the emoji contained string. This method will look for a regex pattern ^##.*##$. You can name your method like:-

emojiTextView.setText(getTextWithEmojis(R.string.string_name));