fromHtml: Different behaviour on JellyBean and KitKat (and above)

Question

I am using fromHtml to display formatted text (bold italic etc) in TextView. However, I found it's behaviour is different on JellyBean (4.1.2) and KitKat(4.4.2)

Here is code:

    String myHtml = "<b>hello</b>&#128516;";
    Spanned spanned = Html.fromHtml(myHtml, null, null);

Here html string has 😄 which is unicode for an emoji. Now after calling fromHtml it returns following value on KitKat (and above):

spanned = hello😄

Here is screenshot of Android Studio for the same:

This is expected behaviour as we can see corresponding emoji in spanned.

But on JellyBean the same call returns following value:

spanned = hello�� 

Here is screenshot:

This is indeed not expected and driving me nuts. I don't know what I am doing wrong. If anyone having idea please can you help?

Answer 1

Surprisingly, root of this problem was in Html.toHtml which I had used to convert text in TextView to html. I used custom toHtmland this problem solved. I used .toHtmlwritten in this answer. Indeed it is great solution. I wonder how Android's original Html.toHtml is so lame and defective.