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It’s always a good practice to extract UI strings from your app code and keep themin an external file. Android makes this easy with a resources directory in each Androidproject.
If you created your project using the Android SDKTools (read Creating anAndroid Project), the tools create a res/
directory in the top level ofthe project. Within thisres/
directory are subdirectories for various resourcetypes. There are also a few default files such asres/values/strings.xml
, which holdsyour string values.
Create Locale Directories and String Files
To add support for more languages, create additional values
directories insideres/
that include a hyphen and the ISO country code at the end of thedirectory name. For example,values-es/
is the directory containing simpleresourcess for the Locales with the language code "es". Android loads the appropriate resourcesaccording to the locale settings of the device at run time.
Once you’ve decided on the languages you will support, create the resource subdirectories andstring resource files. For example:
MyProject/ res/ values/ strings.xml values-es/ strings.xml values-fr/ strings.xml
Add the string values for each locale into the appropriate file.
At runtime, the Android system uses the appropriate set of string resources based on thelocale currently set for the user's device.
For example, the following are some different string resource files for different languages.
English (default locale), /values/strings.xml
:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <resources> <string name="title">My Application</string> <string name="hello_world">Hello World!</string> </resources>
Spanish, /values-es/strings.xml
:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <resources> <string name="title">Mi Aplicación</string> <string name="hello_world">Hola Mundo!</string> </resources>
French, /values-fr/strings.xml
:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <resources> <string name="title">Mon Application</string> <string name="hello_world">Bonjour le monde !</string> </resources>
Note: You can use the locale qualifier (or anyconfiguration qualifer) on any resource type, such as if you want to providelocalized versions of your bitmap drawable. For more information, seeLocalization.
Use the String Resources
You can reference your string resources in your source code and other XML files using theresource name defined by the<string>
element's name
attribute.
In your source code, you can refer to a string resource with the syntax R.string.<string_name>
. There are a variety of methods that accept a string resource thisway.
For example:
// Get a string resource from your app'sResources
String hello =getResources()
.getString(R.string.hello_world); // Or supply a string resource to a method that requires a string TextView textView = new TextView(this); textView.setText(R.string.hello_world);
In other XML files, you can refer to a string resource with the syntax @string/<string_name>
whenever the XML attribute accepts a string value.
For example:
<TextView android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="@string/hello_world" />