How to enter special characters in an EditText in Android?

Question

Is there any way to input special characters (which are not present in the default soft keyboard ,eg. theta) in an Android EditText?

Thanks..

Answer 1

Well as per your need, I would like to suggest to create a custom keyboard because the stock keyboard which comes with the device may not have the special characters you need.

You can refer the following tutorial to create a custom keyboard

http://www.fampennings.nl/maarten/android/09keyboard/index.htm

or you can see this search result which may serve your purpose,

https://github.com/search?q=android+custom+keyboard&ref=cmdform

And from below site you can get the list of Unicode characters which Android supports,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unicode_characters

http://unicode-table.com/en/#0026

Note: Writing the whole code to create a custom keyboard is beyond the scope of this answer, so I mentioned the reference link.

Answer 2

What you are going to do is to create a custom keyboard. First thing you want is to hide the default keyboard when an EditText is focused:

getWindow().setSoftInputMode(
WindowManager.LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_ALWAYS_HIDDEN);

Now, you must create a custom layout (RelativeLayout or Multiple LinearLayouts this is your desire), create and set text to the buttons that you want to show. Make this keyboard view setVisibility(View.INVISIBLE) or setVisibility(View.GONE), and whenever your EditText is focused, make it setVisibility(View.VISIBLE).

After keyboard is visible, programming the rest is up to you it is practically easy.

If you also need a guide, here is an example.