Android question mark in TextView?

Question

I have a problem with accented characters in a TextView in an Android activity. The rendering shows me question marks instead chars "è" and "à". The flow is: Get a midi file from web resource --> extract lyrics --> put lyrics in a TextView. I don't understand if is a problem with encoding or charset. I try to encode a file with "UTF-8" or "ISO..." but every attempt failed. Can you help me?

Thanks in advance.

If they are showing up as `?`, that usually implies that a glyph is missing in the font. However, those characters should be supported. — CommonsWare, May 22 '14 at 22:48
I confirm these charaters exist in the Android **standard font**, as they are present in Italian language. I suppose that the original file isn't **UTF-8 encoded** OR you are using a custom font. — Phantômaxx, May 23 '14 at 07:12
You have to know the encoding of the lyrics; it's unlikely to be UTF-8. — CL., May 23 '14 at 07:28
@CL The problem is that the file is a midi and I don't understand how to extract encoding informations for lyrics sequence. — murdock, May 23 '14 at 10:01
OK. Therefore it's impossible know lyrics encoding. That's true? — murdock, May 23 '14 at 10:14
@CommonsWare, Der Golem, I have tried to change font but the activity show question marks again. I think that the problem occur when I get a file from web. I have tried to log lyrics String before put its in a TextView and print question marks too. — murdock, May 23 '14 at 11:27

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered May 22 '14 at 23:00

2

You can try something like this before you put the lyrics into a textview:

newLyrics = new String(oldString.getBytes("UTF-8"),"UTF-8");

answered May 22 '14 at 23:00

MJ93

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Hi @MJ93, your solution is probably correct but not for me. My problem is on the encoding midi file that I get from web resource. I need to encode correctly the file before extract lyrics text with MIDI Api. – murdock May 23 '14 at 13:56

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 16 '16 at 11:34

Check this out once:

https://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~r92092/ref/midi/

Midi files basically comprises of binary format + ascii values as header data, so if you can convert that and represent it like-
If you can encode that binary format to base64, this will turn any data into ascii safe text

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 28 '18 at 11:43

You can try below code:

//String encode function
fun encodeEmoji(message: String): String {
    try {
        return URLEncoder.encode(
            message,
            "UTF-8"
        )
    } catch (e: UnsupportedEncodingException) {
        return message
    }

}


//String decode function
fun decodeEmoji(message: String): String {
    val myString: String? = null
    try {
        return URLDecoder.decode(
            message, "UTF-8"
        )
    } catch (e: UnsupportedEncodingException) {
            return message
    }

}

use of function

    var string:String=CommonMethod.encodeEmoji("your string")

    string=CommonMethod.decodeEmoji(string)

Android question mark in TextView?

3 Answers3