title: How to handle sending and recieving smileys in android
body: <p>I need to handle smileys in one of my android project. I did it by doing utfencoding when I am sending post request and doing decoding when I receive response. The problem is arising with mysql character limit as while inserting its saving encoded response and sending same back to android device. so in android a smiley is counted as one character and on mysql its around 4-5 characters per smiley. I know the possible solution could be saving decoded sring in mysql but then most of the time its corrupting the emojis when decoding when saving to server and encoding the string while sending the response. I had used following functions for encoding and decoding the request and response respectively</p>
  
  <pre><code> val = URLEncoder.encode(string, "UTF-8");
   value = URLDecoder.decode(text, "UTF-8"); 
  </code></pre>