Accept unicode Input from user in java

[Mahesh Kedari]

Hi All
I am designing a multilingual desktop application. My Requirement is, i want to allow your to enter unicode input in application.
Currently i am using one external application called "Baraha Script" for input. But i wanted to create my own java code which will allow user to enter the data in selected language.
Can anyone help me for the same, or at least give a pointer for studies?

Thanks.
Mahesh

[Campbell Ritchie]

Welcome to JavaRanch

Have you found the appropriate page in the Unicode charts? Can you get it to print on a JOptionPane?

StringBuilder builder = new StringBuilder(22);
for (int i = 0x05d0; i < 0x05ea; i++)
{
    builder.append((char)i);
}//end for
JOptionPane.showMessageDialog(null, builder.toString());

I chose Hebrew because it has few letters (22) which form a continuous series so you won't get any rectangles in your output.

[Mahesh Kedari]

Thanks alot Campbell for reply, but the code that you have posted is for displaying unicode data in java.
I wanted to accept the input from user.

[Campbell Ritchie]

Sounds like the sort of thing you can use a JOptionPane input dialog, or a JTextField, or similar for. Have you tried any of them?

[Oliver Brocker]

I have the same issue. Copy&paste 'special' unicodes into an JInputField in my application leads to squares. Doing the same with a test snippet works fine. Any idea why this happens?

You can try it with युनिकोड

public class Test
{
	public static void main(String[] args)
	{
		JOptionPane.showInputDialog("bla");  
	}
}

Edit:
Windows7 64bit german: c&p युनिकोड fails, c&p ныя сымбалі works fine
Mint13 Cinnamon german 32bit: c&p युनिकोड works fine, c&p ныя сымбалі works fine, too

[Tony Docherty]

It may be that default font being used by JOptionPane can't display those characters. I just pasted them into a JTextField in an application I wrote to handle multiple languages and it worked for me. See below:

[Oliver Brocker]

Thank you for your reply. You're probably right. It very likely depends on the fonts installed on the client PC.
So I don't think it's an issue of my application, and unfortunately there's nothing I could do.

Edit:
I think about it and there something I do not get. If it's a font related issue, why are Firefox, MS Word, MS Notepad and other applications on the Client PC able to display the characters, but my application is not?

[Tony Docherty]

Possibly because the font that the Java option pane is using is a logical font and logical fonts get mapped to a physical font on your system. It maybe those applications are using a font which supports that character set but the logical font is being mapped to font(s) (I seem to remember it maps to multiple fonts to get a greater range of possible character sets) that does not support the required characters.

To test this write a simple gui app with a text field which you set to use a physical font which you know works (ie the one notepad is using). Then cut and paste the text from notepad to your text field.

[Oliver Brocker]

A good idea and I've tried it and now I'm totally confused. The same font is working in MS Notepad, but not in JTextField.

import java.awt.Font;
import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.JTextField;
 
public class Test 
{
     public static void main(String[] args) 
     {
    	JFrame frame = new JFrame();
    	JTextField txt = new JTextField();
    	txt.setFont(new Font("Lucida Console", Font.PLAIN, 12));
    	frame.add(txt);
        frame.setSize(400, 200);
        frame.setVisible(true);
    }
}

[Oliver Brocker]

Any help would be greatly appreciated

[Paul Clapham]

Have you looked at all the fonts supported by your Java implementation to see if "Lucida Console" is one of them?