Help I see the emoticons, but HOW?

[plnelson]

I have a Galaxy S3 phone from Verizon running Android 4.3. It's not rooted and I haven't installed any Emoji app on it.

My gf likes to send text messages with emoticons from her iPhone and they display on my S3 just fine. And these are really elaborate ones, not just smiley faces. For example I was going to the hospital for some tests and she sent me a SMS to encourage me to not worry and it had an arm making a muscle (like "be strong") and a little kid praying.

How does my Android S3 know how to interpret these? Is there a standard set of emoticon characters or escape sequences that are part of the SMS technical standard?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Unforgiven]

They may just be attached images coming through on the MMS instead of having something like :hmmmm2: converted to :hmmmm2:

 

[plnelson]

They're totally embedded in the text and I can move my cursor around them and edit characters before or after them, and copy and paste them from my clipboard, and basically do anything with them like they're any other character, so they don't seem like attached images.

 

[plnelson]

They're totally embedded in the text and I can move my cursor around them and edit characters before or after them, and copy and paste them from my clipboard, and basically do anything with them like they're any other character, so they don't seem like attached images.

I've confirmed that they are indeed just characters by forwarding the message to my PC and examining the hex. The "muscle arm" is 0x01F4AA and the praying child is 0x01F64F. And these symbols do both correspond to the standard uses of those symbols on their respective unicode pages.

So what range of hex values does SMS support, and what determines whether my Android phone can display appropriate symbols for them?
How do I send arbitrary hexadecimal values is text messages on my S3?

 

[Unforgiven]

Normally and SMS app would interpret something like :) to but it wouldn't be a hex code, just plain text as that is all that can be transmitted via SMS. MMS on the other hand can handle images, video, and other more sophisticated things.

What you are seeing doesn't translate to a character from ASCII, so it must be coming through as MMS.

 

[mikedt]

Not sure about entering the required hex codes or changing the code pages in SMS. Try using an emoji enabled SMS app, like Go SMS with the emoji plug-in, along with a keyboard that can do emoji. The default Android SMS app doesn't support emoji as standard, that's why it's not showing them. It's the messaging app itself that takes the "0x01F4AA" and shows the ���� "muscle arm" or whatever. WingDings and other dingbat fonts are very similar to emoji.

Desktop OSs can do emoji OK.....����

Some emoji coming from iOS devices might be proprietary and copyright Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Which basically means no one else can do it or they'd be hearing from Apple's lawyers.

 

[mikedt]

Normally and SMS app would interpret something like :) to but it wouldn't be a hex code, just plain text as that is all that can be transmitted via SMS. MMS on the other hand can handle images, video, and other more sophisticated things.

What you are seeing doesn't translate to a character from ASCII, so it must be coming through as MMS.

Thing with sending non-ASCII characters via SMS, they need the correct encoding and/or code page. e.g. sending SMSs in Chinese, which is most definitely not ASCII. it uses an encoding scheme like Big5. It's the same with any language that uses non-roman characters, and emoji is handled the same way AFAIK.

Whatever is receiving the SMS needs to know how to decode it correctly, if they're coming from an iPhone, could be something that only iOS devices can recognise. There's something called "Apple Color Emoji" which can be sent and received via SMS from iPhones, which is what the OP is referring to, however Android doesn't support it AFAIK. Although third party SMS emoji plug-ins might.

Emoji is supposed to be defined in unicode, but only a subset might be standard, and Apple could very well be doing their own thing with it as well.