strings

Detect and remove Emojis from Text on Windows Phone

noemoticonskeyboard

In my recent project, I work with a lot of text that get’s its value from user input. To enable the best possible experience for my users, I choose the InputScope Text on all TextBoxes, because it provides the word suggestions while writing.

The Text will be submitted to a webserver via a REST API. And now the problem starts. The emojis that are part of the Windows Phone OS are not supported by the API and the webserver.

Of course, I was immediately looking for a way to get around this. I thought this might be helpful for some of you, so I am sharing two little helper methods for detecting and removing the emojis .

After publishing the first version of this post, I got some feedback that made me investigating a bit more on this topic.  The emojis are so called unicode symbols, and thanks to the Unicode behind it, they are compatible with all platforms that have the matching Unicode list implemented.

Windows Phone has  a subset of all available Unicode characters in the OS keyboard, coming from different ranges in the Unicode characters charts. Like we have to do sometimes, we have to maintain our own list to make sure that all emojis are covered by our app in this case and update our code if needed.

If you want to learn more about unicode charts, they are officially available here: http://www.unicode.org/charts/

Update 2: I am using this methods in a real world app. Although the underlying Unicode can be used, often normal text will be read as emoji. That’s why I reverted back to my initial version with the emojis in it. I never had any problems with that.

Now let’s have a look at the code I am using. First is my detecting method, that returns a bool after checking the text (input):

             public static bool HasUnsoppertedCharacter(string text)
             {
            string pattern = @"[{allemojisshere}]";

            Regex RegexEmojisKeyboard = new Regex(pattern);

            bool booleanreturnvalue = false;

            if (RegexEmojisKeyboard.IsMatch(text))
            {
                booleanreturnvalue = true;
            }
            else if (!RegexEmojisKeyboard.IsMatch(text))
            {
                booleanreturnvalue = false;
            }
            return booleanreturnvalue;
            }

 

As you can see, I declared a character range with all emojis. If one or more emojis is found, the bool will always return true. This can be used to display a MessageBox for example while the user is typing.

The second method removes the emojis from any text that is passed as input string.

             public static string RemovedUnSoppertedCharacterString(string text)
             {
            string result = string.Empty;
            string cleanedResult = string.Empty;

            string pattern = @"[{allemojishere}]";

            MatchCollection matches = Regex.Matches(text, pattern);

            foreach (Match match in matches)
            {
                result = Regex.Replace(text, pattern, string.Empty);
                cleanedResult = Regex.Replace(result, "  ", " ");
            }
            return cleanedResult;
             }

Also here I am using the character range with all emojis . The method writes all occurrences of emojis into a MatchCollection for Regex. I iterate trough this collection to remove all of them. The Method also checks the string for double spaces in the text and makes it a single space, as this happens while removing the emojis .

User Experience hint:

use this method with care, as it could be seen as a data loss from your users. I am using the first method to display a MessageBox to the user that emojis are not supported and that they will be removed, which I am doing with the second method. This way, my users are informed and they don’t need to do anything to correct that.

You might have noticed that there is a placeholder “{allemojishere}” in the code above. WordPress or the code plugin I use aren’t supporting the Emoticons in code, that’s why I attached my helper class.

As always, I hope this will be helpful for some of you.

Happy coding!

Posted by msicc in Archive, 1 comment

Xamarin: Resources of an Android app project

As I mentioned already in my first blog post about Xamarin, Android has a different project structure – even if you use Xamarin.

A very important part of this structure are resources. We have different kind of resources in an Android app:

  • Icons & Images
  • Layout (XML files)
  • Values (string resource files)

Let’s start with Icons & Images.

As you can see in the solution window, there is a folder called ‘Resources’. Here you will put all kind of resources, like images, icons, layouts and so on.

The corresponding class for images in Android is called ‘drawable’, that holds a reference to’ Icon.png’. The project structure is based on that, that’s why the resources folder has all images inside the folder ‘drawable’. As Android has various screen sizes, you may have a folder for structure like ‘drawable’, ‘drawable-hdpi, ‘drawable-ldpi’ and so on. Android scales your image resources to match the screen automatically if you do not define alternate layouts.

To make your files available in your app, you need to set the Build Action to ‘Android Resource’:

Screenshot (278)

Let’s have a look to the Layout files:

Layout files are XML files that contain the UI of a page, control or a view. You can use these XML files for example to define items of a ListView or simply the application page. Every new project has a ‘Main.axml’ file.

There are two ways to create a layout. The first one is using the visual designer:

Screenshot (280)

This works for basic layouts like adding the button above. Also, if you don’t know the properties of a control you added, you will be able to add it here to get started.

If you are familiar with writing your UI in code (like XAML)  and want to do so in your Android app, just click the ‘Source’ tab at the bottom in the visual designer. You will see something like this:

<?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">
<Button
android:id="@+id/myButton"
android:layout_width="fill_parent"
android:layout_height="wrap_content"
android:text="@string/hello" />
</LinearLayout>

If you want to add and modify a control, but don’t know how the properties are, this page has a list of all controls, which are called ‘widgets’ in Android. That’s also the corresponding namespace: android.widget.

Like in an Windows Phone app, you also have a string resource file in Android projects. This file is once again a XML file, but with a different structure:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
<string name="hello">Hello World, Click Me!</string>
<string name="app_name">gettingstarted</string>
</resources>

All strings need to be declared inside the <resources> tag. The definition is always like <string name=”yourstringname”>stringcontent</string>. Empty strings are not supported and will throw an error at building your project.

Let’s have a look on how we can work with our resources, based on our gettingstarted project. We have the following code inside our MainActivity class:

int count = 1;

		protected override void OnCreate (Bundle bundle)
		{
			base.OnCreate (bundle);

			// Set our view from the "main" layout resource
			SetContentView (Resource.Layout.Main);

			// Get our button from the layout resource,
			// and attach an event to it
			Button button = FindViewById<Button> (Resource.Id.myButton);
			button.Text = GetString (Resource.String.hello);

			button.Click += delegate {
				button.Text = string.Format ("{0} clicks!", count++);
			};
		}

As you can see, the we are defining our view from our Layout file ‘Main.axml’ by using the SetContentView() method. The file is added to our resources list as Layout with the name we defined.

Our MainActivity does not know that we have a button inside our layout. To make the button visible to our MainActivity, we need to reference it. This is done by declaring a Button instance and using the FindViewById<T>(ResourceName) method.

If you have not given your button a name, now is the right time to do so. In our example the button has the name “myButton”.  The syntax is very important, make sure you add “@+id/” to the name.

android:id="@+id/myButton"

Now our button is visible to our MainActivity code page and can be accessed. The sample project references the button content in the Layout file:

android:text="@string/hello"

After referencing our button, we could also use the following code to get the button content from the resource file:

button.Text = GetString (Resource.String.hello);

Whenever your want to get a string from the resource file in an Activity, the GetString() method is used.

I hope this post helps you to understand how resources are used in an Android app and how to handle it a Xamarin project.

Happy coding everyone!

Posted by msicc in Android, Dev Stories, Xamarin, 0 comments