android - Unicode characters not displayed in TextView.setText

Question

I can't get a TextView to correctly dynamically display unicode characters, and it's driving me batty. I've stripped it down to the bare minimum, but the TextView populated by setText still shows diamonds with question marks inside them for the unicode characters. The version populated from strings.xml shows the multibyte characters perfectly. Here's the activity:

public class TestMultibyteActivity extends Activity
{
  /** Called when the activity is first created. */
  @Override
  public void onCreate( Bundle savedInstanceState )
  {
    super.onCreate( savedInstanceState );
    setContentView( R.layout.main );
    TextView textField = (TextView) findViewById( R.id.text_field );
    String str = "Tübingen systemportef?lje";
    Log.d( "MULTIBYTE", str ); //note that this prints the multibyte chars correctly.
    //EDIT: oh crap, no it doesn't.  might be onto something here...
    textField.setText( str );
  }
}

And here's the layout:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
              android:orientation="vertical"
              android:layout_width="fill_parent"
              android:layout_height="fill_parent">
  <TextView android:id="@+id/text_field"
            android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"/>
  <TextView android:layout_width="fill_parent"
            android:layout_height="wrap_content"
            android:text="@string/unicodechars"/>
</LinearLayout>

Here's strings.xml:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
  <string name="app_name">TestMultibyteActivity</string>
  <string name="unicodechars">Tübingen systemportef?lje</string>
</resources>

I'm building with ant. Here's my default.properties:

target=Google Inc.:Google APIs:8

And here's my AndroidManifest.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"
      package="com.mycompany.android.multibyte"
      android:versionCode="1"
      android:versionName="1.0">
    <application android:label="@string/app_name" android:icon="@drawable/icon">
        <activity android:name="TestMultibyteActivity"
                  android:label="@string/app_name">
            <intent-filter>
                <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" />
                <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" />
            </intent-filter>
        </activity>
    </application>
</manifest> 

I've tinkered with everything I can think of, but it seems like unicode characters are getting split by the CharSequence interface, and I can't figure out why.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, you just can't do it that way from strings.xml AFAIK.

You're left doing one of two things.

• Adding the Unicode character within java to the String in the XML file:

  String str = "u00A9" + getContext().getString(R.string.your_string);
  

• Entering the text as HTML in java:

  yourTextView.setText(Html.fromHtml("your chars"));
  

Hope this is useful.