Develop Reference

Android Studio:Where to store a text file and the path for it

I'm developing a strategy game that will have a country full of kingdoms. I want to be able to store and read back in the information of the kingdomgs. I've looked at tutorials online but they just aren't specific to what I'm looking for. So basically:
-Where to store a text file which holds string values.
-The correct file path.
-And how to read from that text file, and check if it is empty.

You can store text data in string resource file:
https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/string-resource.html
Also you can use asset to store text
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/res/AssetManager.html
And there is diffrenece:
Difference between /res and /assets directories

Performance at working with strings android

Could somebody tell me what is better in terms of performance?
Is it better to save 2 strings at string.xml, like 'abc' and 'abc:'
Or should I save only the first one and concatenate ':' when needed at Java coding ???

Very difficult to answer depending on what your strings will represent and what you need to append. Localization is also an issue, for example...
Dog // English
Chien // French
Hund // German
Using string resources allows you to create different resource files depending on the locale of the device and Android will automatically use the right localized string resource file. If all you need to do is append a single character such as : then you'll double every string for every language.
If you choose to only save the basic strings and append the character using code, then the code will be universal and you'll simply need to append the character to whatever localized word - potentially a lot more efficient.

Both from storage perspective and performance you should save only "abc";
getting extra data from disk takes far longer as some quick in-memory actions.
storing the same data twice is bad practice in general

If you have to concatenate multiple strings you should use StringBuilder - http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.5.0/docs/api/java/lang/StringBuilder.html
It's much faster then using '+' or '.concat()'

Android - lookup an xml element node name from its value

I have an android app that I want to internationalise.
I have extracted the app strings and deployed them in resource files and all that works fine.
The remaining issue I have is that my app reads a folder structure and actually pulls filenames in as words to use in the app.
I have these filenames/words defined in my xml, but I can't figure out how to dynamically lookup the english language word.
So. here's the scenario.
Filename = hello.png. I want the word "hello" to appear in my app corresponding to the image; I have the word "hello" defined in my strings.xml and the corresponding language files as "hello_file" (i.e. the word "hello" can be accessed by R.string.hello_file). What I think I need to do is take the english word from the filename and do a reverse lookup on the strings.xml file and find the node corresponding to that and then lookup the corresponding word in the strings_xx.xml file for the iso language translations.
But I don't know how to do that...
Perhaps I'm over complicating this? It does not seem an ideal use case for the strings_xx.xml translation facility.
Any other ideas?

Use string array http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/string-resource.html#StringArray
String[] files = getResources().getStringArray(R.array.file_names);
In code you can loop through all values to find which one you need.

Android Strings

I wrote a big app with thousands of string in the code.... very bad idea, because now I want to translate each string.... big problem.
Copying all strings to the strings.xml takes a long time.
Eclipse has an option to take all selected strings and put them into messages.properties.
Does this work similiar like strings.xml? When, why all people use strings.xml.
Or should is use eclipse to seperate each string and than I should copy them to string.xml?

All people are using strings.xml because this is the normal way to do it on Android. You don't have to manage the load of the strings, to call any locale function in your script.
You can see the documentation here : http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/index.html
BTW, you can easily transform your eclipse generated file to an strings.xml file after the extraction.

In Eclipse you can use the shortcut keys Alt + Shift A, S to extract an inline string in to the strings.xml file via a popup dialog - might be a bit easier than doing it by hand. And as the others say, yes you should ALWAYS use the strings.xml file so that you only have to look in one place when you want to change a string, instead of having to search through all your code.

Keep Strings into .txt file or put them into a Database?

Hey, I have a lot of Strings that I use into my app, the .txt file that I use has ~14000 lines.. and each 3-10 lines are divided into sections like <String="Chapter I"> ... </String> ..
Speaking of performance/speed, should I put the sections into a Database, Or read line by line through the .txt file and check if the section number is the current one? Will this affect speed/performance?
I could also divide each ~2000 lines into a different .txt file so there would be less lines to go through. Is this a bad way of storing data? Thanks

I think sqlite would do the trick. It will probably be way faster than parsing a text file, plus you wont have to maintain the headache of your own ad hoc text database, or build a parser in the first place. Basically, use it, its way easier.

The standard way to deal with Strings in Android is to put them into res/values/strings.xml (I'm pretty sure you can have multiple String files in that directory if you like). If you are developing in Eclipse it will automatically populate the R class (the resource class) with constants that you can use to reference these Strings in your code:
R.string.mystring
Or in XML layouts:
#string/mystring
Or if you're doing something more custom you can use:
String string = getString(R.string.hello);
I would definitely choose this over a .txt file. It's much easier. All the work is done for you! Have a read of this Android article about it.

This is what a database is for. Use it.