Question

I’ve got a common use-case wherein a user selects one item out of many (say, on a spinner or autocomplete list), then enters the data. For example, let’s say the user selects a country. Ultimately, the data I want is the country code, not the country name; but the users will want to select based on name, not code. To put it another way, user’s will select “United States”, but I ultimately want that to translate into “US”.

There are a lot of countries. Is there an easy way to setup a mapping in Android to hash from the name to the code? I’ve thought of a few solutions, none of them are quite satisfactory in my mind:

1. A database containing country/code, which I can query on.

2. Setting up all countries as strings in strings.xml, then retrieving the resource by name.

3. Creating a huge Map in code and using that. (This is the least satisfactory answer).

Anyone have any cleverer solutions?

Answer 1

I usually go with 2 parallel string arrays declared like this in strings.xml:

<string-array name="country_codes">
    <item>us</item>
    <item>uk</item>
    <!-- ... -->
</string-array>

Then do

String[] countryCodes = getResources().getStringArray(R.array.country_codes);