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separate values/strings.xml android

I am new here.
How do we go about separating the string values for different categories(fragments,activity, etc.)
For now I put everything in one file,that is the values/strings.xml. When the program gets too big, they are all jumbled together and hard to differentiate.
any advice?
thanks,
techfang

The filename is arbitrary. You can name your strings files as you want strings_my_activity for example

I'll try to give each string a meaningful name, haha. Then, have them listed in section, use newlines to separate them.

You can have multiple string resource files, so it is perfectly allowable for you to have (for example):
res/
strings.xml
main_activity_strings.xml
main_fragment_strings.xml
sub_fragment_strings.xml
The files themselves can have any allowable name really. What is important is what is in the file. So any entry ends up resolving to R.string.xxxxxxx
How desirable this approach is, is of course another question. You may find you want to keep 'global' strings (such as OK, Cancel, etc.) in the top-level strings.xml file.

Where to store string values?In strings.xml or in constants class?

In android, we can store string values either in strings.xml file or in some constants class as static final variable.Is there some reason for selecting one over another in some circumstances?

In a nutshell:
value for use in code: use always constants class.Advantage: codes remain integrated and your package can be utilized in other projects/contexts. You can not do that with string.xml as it is not transported with your package.
value for display in UI: use string.xml. Advantage: you can use localization to display translated texts.
Some situation may arise when both option appears viable. You will have to then decide where are its related values are stored.

As a general rule, use the strings.xml because android uses that XML to enable translating your app into different languages, which it can't do with strings that are hardcoded.
The official android guide on localization say the following;
Move all strings into strings.xml
As you build your apps, remember not to hard code any string. Instead
declare all of your strings as resources in a default strings.xml file
which makes it easy to update and localize. Strings in strings.xml
file can be extracted, translated and integrated back into your app
(with appropriate qualifiers) without any changes to compiled code.
If you generate images with text, put those strings in strings.xml as
well, and regenerate the images after translation.
Strings that are not going to be displayed to the user in any way needn't be stored in the XML, because they will never need translating, and you probably don't want the android system tampering with them in ways you might not know about during runtime.

If the string value is used to display in UI store in Strings.xml Otherwise keep it in code. There can be JSONTags, Key for different api/Thirdparty libraries.These kind of things should be kept in code itself.

strings.xml it is used for localization and needs a context to retrieve the content of a String. If you need a java constant to be accessed in different classes, you a public static final String member. If the string is a message for the user you should use strings.xml

If strings represent text readable by user, and which could potentially be translated to other languages (names of buttons, labels, notification/error messages, etc.) then they should be in strings.xml (actually, it can be any file name you like, not just "strings").
If string is some constant which is used in the app internally (bundle/intent keys, fragments tags, etc.) they should be declared in class

It depends, if it is a text string that will be translated or displayed to the user then for 118n sake, you will want to put in into strings.xml.
However, if the string is something like a server url or api code then you'll want to store those in code as a public static final String

Best way to store multilanguage values on a database using strings.xml?

this is my first question :)
I'm developing an application that stores animal species in a database. The app must be multilanguage, so I tought to take advantage of using strings.xml resource files.
The idea is to store the english name of the species on the db, for example "cat", "dog" etc.. and then display to the user the actual translation, based on an xml like this (for italian):
<string name="dog">Cane</string>
<string name="cat">Gatto</string>
The problem is that R.string contains the name dog and cat, but they are actually int, so I'm searching a way to use the "dog" string to be used to compare the R.string.dog translated value.
I'm almost sure that my design is terribly wrong, but don't know what the correct way to doing this kind of work, since the app is now in a very early stage of development.
Thank you
EDIT with example
This example illustrates the problem:
Database data:
row1: id="1", value="dog"
row2: id="2", value="cat"
String file strings.xml:
<string name="dog">Dog</string>
<string name="cat">Cat</string>
String file strings-it.xml:
<string name="dog">Cane</string>
<string name="cat">Gatto</string>
My problem is: the user want to insert a specie in his native language (eg. "Cane"), and I want to search in the DB for its existence before inserting.
I should loop for every row on the DB (where values are stored in english), get the the translation of each row (eg: I found cat, then I translate to "Gatto") and compare with the user input.
Is it possible to do that?

If you have a string name you want to use, you can use getIdentifier() to get the string id. As an example, to find R.string.cat:
Resources res = getResources();
int stringId = res.getIdentifier("cat", "string", packageName);
In the above example, if there is no R.string.cat found, it will simply return 0. It's an easy test to see if a string exists.
Alternatively, you can get an array of all the string ids in your R.java by using something like:
Field[] fields = R.string.class.getFields();
int[] ids = new int[fields.length];
for(int i=0;i<field.length;i++)
ids[i] = field[i].getInt(null);
Of course, that will also look for any strings that you don't really intend as translations, such as dialog/window titles, label/button captions, etc. I wouldn't advise it in the general case. If I had to do it, I'd prefix the "translation" strings with something so I could easily tell what is what, something like "entry_cat".
Note that we're using reflection, and if you have a lot of strings, it could slow you down. If you are going to loop through R.java, I'd advise only doing it on start-up, and saving the values in some sort of array/list.

First read this.
http://developer.android.com/training/basics/supporting-devices/languages.html
You can create value folder with many language's i.e janapee,dutch etc
you can find out value folder inside the res folder in your project. and create new value folders.
res/
values/
strings.xml
values-es/
strings.xml
values-fr/
strings.xml
JUST TRANSLATE YOUR WORDS BY GOOGLE TRANSLATOR IN ANY LANGUAGE AND PUT INSIDE THE STRING.XML FILE .

Well, first of all, start reading this here:
Suppose that your application's default language is English. Suppose
also that you want to localize all the text in your application to
French, and most of the text in your application (everything except
the application's title) to Japanese. In this case, you could create
three alternative strings.xml files, each stored in a locale-specific
resource directory:
res/values/strings.xml Contains English text for all the strings that
the application uses, including text for a string named title.
res/values-fr/strings.xml Contain French text for all the strings,
including title. res/values-ja/strings.xml Contain Japanese text for
all the strings except title. If your Java code refers to
R.string.title, here is what will happen at runtime:
If the device is set to any language other than French, Android will
load title from the res/values/strings.xml file. If the device is set
to French, Android will load title from the res/values-fr/strings.xml
file. Notice that if the device is set to Japanese, Android will look
for title in the res/values-ja/strings.xml file. But because no such
string is included in that file, Android will fall back to the
default, and will load title in English from the
res/values/strings.xml file.

Which strings to store in strings.xml?

Are there any suggestions on which strings you should store in strings.xml and which strings can be stored as String objects? For example, do I have to put a string into strings.xml, if I use it only to complete a certain action and then it can be destroyed? And what is the main reason in storing strings in xml? Thanks in advance for your answers.

Any string that will be displayed to the user should be in strings.xml. This is useful in case you ever want to support other languages for your application. If you do, you just create a new strings.xml file that language with translated values. You can learn more about it here.

One reason is multi-language support.
You should store the strings that you use in Activities - TextView, button's caption and so on.

You should put most constants in strings.xml, your app title, button names, textview contents...mostly things that wont change in your application.
Another reason for storing strings in xml is for localization. You can store different files for each different Locale or language, and Android will grab the correct file for the phone's selected Locale or language.
Here is a link to the String resource Android page, it will go more deeply into how the language support is done.

You don't store all the strings in strings.xml, but only strings constants related to user interface, the strings that you want to translate in different languages.
You can have different folder like :
values
values-fr
values-de
in each a strings.xml file with you UI messages translated in many languages.
Regards,
Stéphane

Is there a way to retrieve ALL localised versions of an Android application's label?

If an application label is localised, I have a requirement to retrieve all localisation variants. Effectively I need to know if the android:label points to a string reference and, if so, all the locale values present in the string resources. Any ideas?

I don't have a full answer but here's what I came up with.
Localization - Here is the official documentation for android localization. You can ensure that your android:label points to a string reference if you have it point to a key in the /res/values/strings.xml. Specific localization strings can be overridden by using qualifiers on the directory, for instance for French versions you can put them in /res/values-fr/strings.xml. Any values not found in the French version will default to the previous unqualified file.
I'm not sure about getting all the locale strings for a specific resource but there is getAssets().getLocales() which will return a string array of the locales the asset manager has resources for (I'd assume for any resource, not just a particular resource)
Lastly, if you don't need to do this at run time you could try to write a script/program to examine all the localization directories under /res and compile a list of all resources with their localized values.