android translate string with variables

Question

good morning,

i have an android app with a german and english language xml file. now i would like to set and text view like this:

"Hello User x, hello world y." "Hallo Benutzer x, hallo welt y."

for x and y i would like set an variable. how can i translate this text for both languages with dynamic variables ?

Answer 1

Your question seems unclear but from my understanding I am suggesting you the solution.

If you want to pass a dynamic argument to string you can do this by bellow example.

<string name="welcome_messages">Hello, %1$s! You have %2$d new messages.</string>

In this example, the format string has two arguments: %1$s is a string and %2$d is a decimal number. You can format the string with arguments from your application like this:

Resources res = getResources();
String text = String.format(res.getString(R.string.welcome_messages), username, mailCount);

If you wish more look at: http://developer.android.com/intl/pt-br/guide/topics/resources/string-resource.html#FormattingAndStyling

Answer 2

By default android considers English as primary language and loads the string resources from res ⇒ values ⇒ strings.xml. When you want to add support for another language, you need to create a values folder by appending an Hyphen and the ISO language code. For example if you want to add support for French, you should create a values folder named values-fr and keep a strings.xml file in it with all the strings translated into French language.