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I want to use this unicode character in my resource file.
But whatever I do, I end with dalvikvm crash (tested with Android 2.3 and 4.2.2):
W/dalvikvm( 8797): JNI WARNING: input is not valid Modified UTF-8: illegal start byte 0xf0 W/dalvikvm( 8797): string: '📡' W/dalvikvm( 8797): in Landroid/content/res/StringBlock;.nativeGetString:(II)Ljava/lang/String; (NewStringUTF) E/dalvikvm( 8797): VM aborting F/libc ( 8797): Fatal signal 11 (SIGSEGV) at 0xdeadd00d (code=1), thread 8797 (cz.ipex...) I tried these version in my resource file:
<string name="geolocation_icon" translatable="false">📡</string> <!-- HTML --> <string name="geolocation_icon" translatable="false">\uD83D\uDCE1</string> <!-- escaped unicode --> <string name="geolocation_icon" translatable="false">📡</string> <!-- unicode character --> Note that using it in Java String in code works ok:
final String geolocation_icon = "\uD83D\uDCE1"; 
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The process of typing special character in iOS is same as Android. All you have to do is tap and hold the respective alphabet or character and the options will be available on the top. From there, just slide to the required character and release to insert special characters.
Characters are denoted using the notation used in the Unicode Standard, that is, an optional U+ followed by their hexadecimal number, using at least 4 digits, such as "U+1234" or "U+10FFFD". In XML or HTML this could be expressed as "ሴ" or "􏿽".
To insert a Unicode character, type the character code, press ALT, and then press X. For example, to type a dollar symbol ($), type 0024, press ALT, and then press X. For more Unicode character codes, see Unicode character code charts by script.
XML Encoding is defined as the process of converting Unicode characters into binary format and in XML when the processor reads the document it mandatorily encodes the statement to the declared type of encodings, the character encodings are specified through the attribute 'encoding'.
Your character (U+1F4E1) is outside of Unicode BMP (Basic Multilingual Plane - range from U+0000 to U+FFFF).
Unfortunately, Android has very weak (if any) support for non-BMP characters. UTF-8 representation for non-BMP characters requires 4 bytes (0xF0 0x9F 0x93 0xA1). But, Android UTF-8 parser only understands 3 bytes maximum (see it here and here).
It works for you when you use UTF-16 surrogate form representation of this character: "\uD83D\uDCE1". If you were able to encode each surrogate UTF-16 character in modified UTF-8 (aka CESU-8) - it would take 6 bytes total (3 bytes in UTF-8 for each member of surrogate pair), then it would be possible. But, Android does not support CESU-8 explicitly either.
So, your current solution - hard-coding this symbol in source code as surrogate UTF-16 pair seems easiest, at least until Android starts fully supporting non-BMP UTF-8.
UPDATE: this seems to be partially fixed in Android 6.0. This commit has been merged into Android 6, and permits presence of 4-byte UTF-8 characters in XML resources. Its not perfect solution - it will simply automatically convert 4-byte UTF-8 into appropriate surrogate pair. However, it allows to move them from your source code into XML resources. Unfortunately, you can't use this solution until your application can stop supporting any Android version except for 6.0 and later.
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