Question

Knowing the basic key mappings described in ADB Shell Input Events I get the emulation of text input and special keys working quite well. But what about Unicode characters? For instance I want to use umlauts from the German QWERTZ keyboard layout.

This gets me:

$ adb shell input text ö
Killed

So it seems to crash and

adb shell input text \xFC

prints xFC on the input. I have tried to the the events with getevent but I haven’t found a direct mapping, I’ve also looked into the keymapping file /system/usr/keylayout/Qwerty.kl

I believe the only possibility is via the clipboard, but as pointed out in the question Pasting text into Android emulator clipboard using adb shell it seems to be unknown how to use it for Android Ice Cream Sandwich or later..

Answer 1

input won’t work because it can only send single key event through the virtual keyboard (check the source code if you don’t know what I mean).

I think the only way left is using Instrumentation. I guess you can create a test for your Activity and then do something like this:

                final Instrumentation instrumentation = getInstrumentation();
                final long downTime = SystemClock.uptimeMillis();
                final long eventTime = SystemClock.uptimeMillis();
                
                final KeyEvent altDown = new KeyEvent(downTime, eventTime, KeyEvent.ACTION_DOWN,
                        KeyEvent.KEYCODE_GRAVE, 1, KeyEvent.META_ALT_LEFT_ON);
                final KeyEvent altUp = new KeyEvent(downTime, eventTime, KeyEvent.ACTION_UP,
                        KeyEvent.KEYCODE_GRAVE, 1, KeyEvent.META_ALT_LEFT_ON);
                
                instrumentation.sendKeySync(altDown);
                instrumentation.sendCharacterSync(KeyEvent.KEYCODE_A);
                instrumentation.sendKeySync(altUp);
                instrumentation.sendKeySync(altDown);
                instrumentation.sendCharacterSync(KeyEvent.KEYCODE_E);
                instrumentation.sendKeySync(altUp);
                instrumentation.sendKeySync(altDown);
                instrumentation.sendCharacterSync(KeyEvent.KEYCODE_I);
                instrumentation.sendKeySync(altUp);
                instrumentation.sendKeySync(altDown);
                instrumentation.sendCharacterSync(KeyEvent.KEYCODE_O);
                instrumentation.sendKeySync(altUp);
                instrumentation.sendKeySync(altDown);
                instrumentation.sendCharacterSync(KeyEvent.KEYCODE_U);
                instrumentation.sendKeySync(altUp);

This will send the modified keys: àèìòù

update 2022

https://stackoverflow.com/a/71367206/236465 shows another solution using AndroidViewClient/culebra and CulebraTester2-public backend.