How to extract color values (#rgb) from an Android theme?

Question

I want to use colors from a Theme to apply it to some HTML my app is rendering. I am wondering if I can do that?

I am looking to use colors like they are specified in themes.xml:

    <item name="colorBackground">@android:color/background_dark</item>
    <item name="textColorPrimary">@android:color/primary_text_dark</item>

So looking at them they are declared in the same way. So I thought I could access them in the same way too.

That is not the cause though. When trying to access those values this way:

    TypedValue tv = new TypedValue();
    getTheme().resolveAttribute(android.R.attr.colorBackground, tv, true);

    System.out.println("tv.string=" + tv.string);
    System.out.println("tv.coerced=" + tv.coerceToString());

    int colorResourceId = getResources().getColor(tv.resourceId);
    System.out.println("colorResourceId=" + colorResourceId);

    tv = new TypedValue();
    getTheme().resolveAttribute(android.R.attr.textColorPrimary, tv, true);

    System.out.println("tv.string=" + tv.string);
    System.out.println("tv.coerced=" + tv.coerceToString());

    colorResourceId = getResources().getColor(tv.resourceId);
    System.out.println("colorResourceId=" + colorResourceId);

I get this as a result:

I/System.out( 1578): tv.string=null
I/System.out( 1578): tv.coerced=#ffffffff 
I/System.out( 1578): colorResourceId=-1

I/System.out( 1578): tv.string=res/color/primary_text_light.xml
I/System.out( 1578): tv.coerced=res/color/primary_text_light.xml
I/System.out( 1578): colorResourceId=-16777216

The results are different. The first one actually gives me the color "#fffffff" which would work for me, the second one only gives me an xml.

Do I need to jump through a few more hoops here to resolve the actual color? Does my original intention work at all? Maybe it won't work, because colors could be arbitrary drawables?

I didn't find any relevant documentation, but if you know any, just point me there please.

Btw. I also tried obtainStyledAttributes(), but this had basically the same issues.

Answer 1

I think you should rename colorResourceId to myColor or something like that, because that's what it's supposed to be in your code, as far as I can tell.

-16777216 is equivalent with 0xFF000000, which is black color, so probably your theme was black text on a white background.