Emoji in TextView widget breaks Appium Inspector

[DayA]

The problem

When there is an emoji on-screen on an android device in a TextView widget, the appium inspector throws a parsererror. I have attempted this in Appium Desktop versions 1.6.3, 1.7.0, and 1.7.1 and on multiple apps with the same result.

The following is a demonstration of this issue. The parser works as expected on this page:

When emoji are added to the page, the parser breaks:

Environment

• I am running Appium Desktop version 1.7.1 (Also attempted on 1.6.3 and 1.7.0).
• I am on (pick one):
  • [ ] Mac
  • [x] Windows
  • [ ] Linux

[mykola-mokhnach]

switch to uiautomator2 backend

[DayA]

I tested automationName: ‘Appium’ in code to see if that was the issue. My code is able to access and parse textView elements as shown below. I ran the following code:

driver.start_activity('com.samsung.android.app.memo', 'com.samsung.android.app.memo.Main')
for el in driver.find_elements_by_class_name('android.widget.TextView'):
    print(el)
    print(el.text)

And it gave the following result:

<appium.webdriver.webelement.WebElement (session="e810999f-246f-4120-a627-c504fd09b9b4", element="1")>
All memos
<appium.webdriver.webelement.WebElement (session="e810999f-246f-4120-a627-c504fd09b9b4", element="2")>
Emoji 😎😎😎
<appium.webdriver.webelement.WebElement (session="e810999f-246f-4120-a627-c504fd09b9b4", element="3")>
Test

So it seems like the backend is not the issue in Appium itself.

[mykola-mokhnach]

This might be a bug in Appium Desktop. Try reporting the issue to https://github.com/appium/appium-desktop

[DayA]

Thanks, I have reported the issue there.