Question

I am trying to create preferences for an experimental app for android. However I can get the preferences to work.

The preference that I want to use determine the display langue and use this function to retrieve it:

private String selectLang()
{
    SharedPreferences preferences = PreferenceManager.getDefaultSharedPreferences(this);
    String lang = preferences.getString("lang", "n/a");
    return lang;
}

Then inside onCreate method for the ListActivity I use this code to display the right language:

String lang =  selectLang();
String title = (lang == "english") ? "English" : "Arabic";

title is a column in the database. The code does not seem to work and I get Arabic no matter what. I used this code just to know the value of lang:

Toast.makeText(this, lang, Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();

and I get “english” but the English language does not display.

Here is is my XML for the list:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
<string-array name="lang">
    <item>Arabic</item>
    <item>English</item>
</string-array>
<string-array name="langValues">
    <item>arabic</item>
    <item>english</item>
</string-array>
</resources>

I have read in number of answers here on SO that I should use SharedPreference editor but I could not get a full working example of that.

Can you please help?

Answer 1

This: lang == "english" should be lang.equals("english").

Compare strings (as any other object) using equals or equalsIgnoreCase. The == operator compares object references, not content of objects, so your check always evaluated as false.