adb shell input unicode character

Question

Knowing the basic key mappings described in ADB Shell Input Events I get the emulation of text input and special keys working quite well. But what about Unicode characters? For instance I want to use umlauts from the German QWERTZ keyboard layout.

This gets me:

$ adb shell input text ö
Killed

So it seems to crash and

adb shell input text \xFC

prints xFC on the input. I have tried to the the events with getevent but I haven't found a direct mapping, I've also looked into the keymapping file /system/usr/keylayout/Qwerty.kl

I believe the only possibility is via the clipboard, but as pointed out in the question Pasting text into Android emulator clipboard using adb shell it seems to be unknown how to use it for Android Ice Cream Sandwich or later..

Answer 1

I wrote a virtual keyboard that accept broadcast intent, so you can send unicode characters to the editText view via adb.

for e.g. adb shell am broadcast -a ADB_INPUT_TEXT --es msg "你好嗎! Hello!"

Here is the github project: https://github.com/senzhk/ADBKeyBoard

Hope this little project would help.