setText(getString(R.strings.whatever) or setText(R.strings.whatever)?

Question

Both work, obviously if you start concatenating you'll need get string in order to avoid displaying an int.

Question: which is the most 'elegant' or 'recommended' to use?

Thank you

Answer 1

The second approach is more elegant, since internally, the TextView (or whatever View-class) will do the job of getting the String for your specified resource.

Letting components do the internal work is always preferred. Also, it is shorter and more readable.

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About the internals I talked about: If you have a look at Androids source-code, you can see that the setText(int)-method of TextView is implemented like this:

public final void setText(int resid) {
  setText(getContext().getResources().getText(resid));
}

So, it internally uses the Context-class to get the string from the resource-id. Now, if you look at the getText()-method (which also comes from the Context-class), you can see that it is implemented the same way:

public final String getString(int resId) {
  return getResources().getString(resId);
}

So for performance or reliability reasons, it makes no difference. Still, it is shorter and more readable.