Hex String to Color name

Question

This is not a duplicated question, I know that were some questions asked like mine, but I need help on how I can implement to my app.

I'm trying to make a android app that can capture the colors, but i've only discoverd how I can get the Hex value, but I really need the name of the color! please help, someone! Below it's the whole code but where it says

public static String makeHexString(int value) {
return "#" + Integer.toHexString(value).substring(2);}

this line here, Integer.toHexString How can I make it to get the color name instead hex value?

 public class ColorItem implements Parcelable {

    protected final long mId;

    protected int mColor;

    protected String mName;

    protected final long mCreationTime;

    protected transient String mHexString;

    protected transient String mRgbString;

    protected transient String mHsvString;

    public ColorItem(long id, int color) {
        mId = id;
        mColor = color;
        mCreationTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
    }

    private ColorItem(Parcel in) {
        this.mId = in.readLong();
        this.mColor = in.readInt();
        this.mCreationTime = in.readLong();
        this.mName = in.readString();
    }

    public ColorItem(int color) {
        mId = mCreationTime = System.currentTimeMillis();
        mColor = color;
    }

    public long getId() {
        return mId;
    }

    public int getColor() {
        return mColor;
    }

    public void setColor(int color) {
        if (mColor != color) {
            mColor = color;
            mHexString = makeHexString(mColor);
            mRgbString = makeRgbString(mColor);
            mHsvString = makeHsvString(mColor);
        }
    }

    public long getCreationTime() {
        return mCreationTime;
    }

    public String getHexString() {
        if (mHexString == null) {
            mHexString = makeHexString(mColor);
        }
        return mHexString;
    }

    public String getRgbString() {
        if (mRgbString == null) {
            mRgbString = makeRgbString(mColor);
        }
        return mRgbString;
    }

    public String getHsvString() {
        if (mHsvString == null) {
            mHsvString = makeHsvString(mColor);
        }
        return mHsvString;
    }

    public String getName() {
        return mName;
    }

    public void setName(String name) {
        mName = name;
    }

    public static String makeHexString(int value) {
        return "#" + Integer.toHexString(value).substring(2);
    }

    public static String makeRgbString(int value) {
        return "rgb(" + Color.red(value) + ", " + Color.green(value) + ", " + Color.blue(value) + ")";
    }

    public static String makeHsvString(int value) {
        float[] hsv = new float[3];
        Color.colorToHSV(value, hsv);
        return "hsv(" + (int) hsv[0] + "°, " + (int) (hsv[1] * 100) + "%, " + (int) (hsv[2] * 100) + "%)";
    }


    @Override
    public int describeContents() {
        return 0;
    }

    @Override
    public void writeToParcel(Parcel dest, int flags) {
        dest.writeLong(this.mId);
        dest.writeInt(this.mColor);
        dest.writeLong(this.mCreationTime);
        dest.writeString(this.mName);
    }

    public static final Creator<ColorItem> CREATOR = new Creator<ColorItem>() {
        public ColorItem createFromParcel(Parcel source) {
            return new ColorItem(source);
        }

        public ColorItem[] newArray(int size) {
            return new ColorItem[size];
        }
    };
}

Answer 1

Here are a few color names:

public String getColorName(String hexColor) {
    String name = "";
    switch (hexColor.toLowerCase()) {
        case "#ff0000":
            name = "Red";
            break;
        case "#00ff00":
            name = "Green";
            break;
        case "#0000ff":
            name = "Blue";
            break;
        case "#ffffff":
            name = "White";
            break;
        case "#000000":
            name = "Black";
            break;
        default:
            name = "Unknown";
        break;
    }
    return name;
}

Answer 2

What makes this really hard is that generally we describe colours as a specific hex value. There are 2^24 different hex values but only like ~200 named colours.

What you could do is think about this geometrically using the concept of a colour cube. It has 3 dimensions, one for red, one for blue and one for green. If you also had a list of the named colours and how much R, G and B they each contain you can view those as points within the cube. Then for any colour you could find the nearest point and that would be a good estimation of the colour. This would result in a loss of information however because before you have so many possible values (2^24) but after you only have ~200.

In order to do this you first need to parse the hex code into a a 3-d point and also parse each of your colours from your colour list into a 3-d point. For example #ff0024 would be equal to [255, 0, 36].

Now you need to loop through your list of named colours and find the colour name with the minimum distance from your point. I'll give some pseudocode to explain this.

int [][] colorPoints = {{255, 255, 255}, {0, 0, 0}, ...};
String [] colorNames = {"white", "black", ...}; // These two arrays have the same length of N

int [] myColor = parseHexTo3dPoint(hexColorString); // Returns int array of length 3

double minDistance = Double.MAX_VALUE;
String closestColorName = colorNames[0];
for (int i = 0; i < colorNames.length; i++){
    int [] color = colorPoints[i];
    double d0 = (color[0] - myColor[0]);
    double d1 = (color[1] - myColor[1]);
    double d2 = (color[2] - myColor[2]);
    double distance = Math.sqrt(d0*d0 + d1*d1 + d2*d2);
    if (distance < minDistance){
        minDistance = distance;
        closestColorName = colorNames[i];
    }
}

return closestColorName;

Answer 3

Try Color class method:

public static int parseColor (String colorString)

From Android documentation:

Supported formats are: #RRGGBB #AARRGGBB 'red', 'blue', 'green', 'black', 'white', 'gray', 'cyan', 'magenta', 'yellow', 'lightgray', 'darkgray'

Eg:-

int myColor = Color.parseColor("#3F51B5");
myView.setBackgroundColor(myColor);

According to your code:

public static int makeHexString(int value) {
int myColor = Color.parseColor("#" + 
Integer.toHexString(value).substring(2));
return myColor;
}