Question

I have a method that returns one of about 20 possible strings from an EditText. Each of these strings has a corresponding response to be printed in a TextView from strings.xml. Is there a way to call a string from strings.xml using something like context.getResources().getString(R.strings."stringFromMethod")? Is there another way to call a string from a large list like that?

The only methods I can think of is converting each string to an int, and use that to find a string in a string array, or a switch statement. Both of which involve a huge amount if-else if statements to convert the string to an int, and would take just enough steps to change if any strings were added or taken away that I’d be more likely to miss one and have fun bug hunting. Any ideas to do this cleanly?

Edit: Forgot to add, another method I tried was using was to get the resourceID from

int ID = context.getResources().getIdentifier("stringFromMethod", "String", context.getPackageName())

and taking that integer and putting it in

context.getResources().getString(ID)

That doesn’t appear to be working either.

Answer 1

No, you can’t. The getString() requires the resource id in integer format, so you can’t append a string to it.

You can, however, try this:

String packageName = context.getPackageName();
int resId = context.getResources().getIdentifier("stringFromMethod", "string", packageName);
if (resId == 0) {
    throw new IllegalException("Unknown string resource!"; // can't find the string resource!
}
string stringVal = context.getString(resId);

The above statements will return string value of resource R.string.stringFromMethod.