Question

I am creating a custom field where I want to replace some unicode caracters by pictures. Its like doing emoticons for blackberry device. Well I have a problem looping the caracters in the edit field and replacing the unicode caracters by images. When the text becomes too long, the loop takes too much time.

My code is as follows:

String aabb = "";
char[] chara = this.getText().toCharArray();
for (int i = loc; i < chara.length; i ++) {
   Character cc = new Character(chara[i]);
   aabb += cc.toString();
   if (unicodeCaracter) {
       //Get the location
       //draw the image in the appropriate X and Y
   }
}

Well this works fine, and the images are getting in the right place. But the problem is when the text becomes large, the looping is taking too much time, and the input of the text on the device becomes non friendly.

How to find the unicode caracters in a text without having to loop each time for them? Is their another way than this that I missed?

I need help with this issue. Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Well you’re creating a new Character and a new String in each iteration of the loop, and converting the string to a character array to start with. You’re also using string concatenation in a loop rather than using a StringBuffer. All of these will be hurting performance.

It’s not obvious what you mean by “Unicode characters” here – all characters in Java are Unicode characters. I suspect you really want something like:

String text = this.getText();
StringBuffer buffer = new StringBuffer(text.length());
for (int i = 0; i < text.length(); i++) {
    char c = text.charAt(i);
    buffer.append(c);
    if (c > 127) { // Or whatever
        // Take some action
    }
}

I’m assuming the “take some action” will be changing the buffer in some respect, otherwise the buffer is pointless of course… but fundamentally that’s likely to be the sort of change you want.

The string concatenation in a loop is a particularly bad idea – see my article on it for more details.