Question

I don’t know how to read Japanese – I don’t know what this character means.

We are using encoding UTF-8 in our XML file and can see all other Japanese characters in our app except for “〜”, which shows up as a box. “〜” shows up in Eclipse, tried replacing it with a tilde (~), but the tilde is smaller and looks slightly different (〜 vs ~) in our app.

On Google Translate, it interprets the character as a tilde http://translate.google.com/#ja/en/%E3%80%9C

In Android, we have used 〜 and \u301C but they both show up as boxes.

An example of how the character is used “気分が悪いよ〜！”

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My question: This is the only character that’s missing for us (we have an American Android phones and changed the language to Japanese). How do we make this character show up?

Answer 1

The problem is that there are two similar characters in Unicode. First, we have U+301C WAVE DASH, described here, then we have U+FF5E FULLWIDTH TILDE, described here. The first of these is CJK_Symbols block, which appears not to be present in all Unicode fonts, such as on Android. However, the second is in the Half_And_Full_Forms block, which does appear to be present, and a quick test on my Android phone with the standard Japanese IME confirms that U+FF5E FULLWIDTH TILDE is used.

Now, you mention that you are encoding UTF-8 – perhaps there is an error in the conversion tables you are using? I would recommend that you just silently replace all instances of U+301C WAVE DASH with U+FF5E FULLWIDTH TILDE.

UPDATE: You mention your translator – perhaps they are using a Mac, which appears to prefer the U+301C WAVE DASH? Furthermore, here is a WordPress plugin that suggests a few more characters that should be tested, although I suspect that the tilde/wave dash will be the only problem.