display built-in emoji keys for inputmethod

Question

I'm building a custom soft keyboard for android and would like to add a layout to include the emoji keys similar to what the default android keyboard (AOSP) is doing. I've searched around but it seems that most people are trying to display custom emoji from images. I'm looking to show the built-in icons that comes with Android (as shown below):

It seems that I should be able to use the Unicode characters to send images from the keyboard, but my first attempt seems to generate only the older versions of the emojis. How do I support the latest emoji the phone can handle? Also, how do I display the emojis in my keyboard as in the image above?

Answer 1

Thanks for all the suggestions. What I got to work for showing an emoji layout in my custom keyboard was the following:

1. In the .xml layout file, for each emoji you want to add, create a line like this: <Key android:codes="0x1F602" android:keyLabel="\ud83d\ude02"/>

2. When committing the key, use: getCurrentInputConnection().commitText(String.valueOf(Character.toChars(primaryCode)), 1);