Emoji source - a helper JAVA class that converts emojis from a json file to a string you can use in android. This was created to be implemented in http://wheredatapp.com, android's greatest search engine.

EmojiSource.java

package com.nextstagesearch.sources;

import android.content.Context;

import org.json.JSONArray;
import org.json.JSONException;
import org.json.JSONObject;

import java.io.IOException;
import java.io.InputStream;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.List;

/**
 * Created by oded on 9/14/15.
 * Emoji source - a helper JAVA class that converts emojis from a json file to a string you can use in android.
 * This was created to be implemented in http://wheredatapp.com, android's greatest search engine.
 */
public class EmojiSource {

    public final static void iterateEmojis(Context context, Emoji emoji) {
        try {
            JSONObject jsonEmojis = new JSONObject(jsonEmojis(context));
            Iterator<?> keys = jsonEmojis.keys();
            while (keys.hasNext()) {
                JSONObject jsonEmoji = jsonEmojis.getJSONObject((String) keys.next());
                List<String> keywords = new ArrayList<>();
                JSONArray jsonArray = jsonEmoji.getJSONArray("keywords");
                for (int i = 0; i < jsonArray.length(); i++) {
                    keywords.add(jsonArray.get(i).toString());
                }

                String emojiString = getEmoji(jsonEmoji.getString("unicode"));
                if (emojiString == null) continue;

                emoji.doSomethingWithEmoji(emojiString, jsonEmoji.getString("name"), keywords);
            }
        } catch (JSONException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }

    private final static String jsonEmojis(Context context) {
        String json = null;
        try {
            //emoji from: https://github.com/Ranks/emojione/blob/master/emoji.json
            InputStream is = context.getAssets().open("csv/emoji.json");
            int size = is.available();
            byte[] buffer = new byte[size];
            is.read(buffer);
            is.close();
            json = new String(buffer, "UTF-8");
        } catch (IOException ex) {
            ex.printStackTrace();
            return null;
        }
        return json;
    }


    private interface Emoji {
        void doSomethingWithEmoji(String emoji, String description, List<String> keywords);
    }

    private static String getEmoji(String unicode) {
        if (unicode.contains("-")) return null;

        return new String(Character.toChars(Integer.decode("0x" + unicode)));
    }
}