Formatting and Styling

Here are a few important things you should know about how to properly format and style your string resources.

Escaping apostrophes and quotes

If you have an apostrophe or a quote in your string, you must either escape it or enclose the whole string in the other type of enclosing quotes. For example, here are some stings that do and don't work:

 name="good_example">"This'll work" name="good_example_2">This\'ll also work name="bad_example">This doesn't work name="bad_example_2">XML encodings don't work

Formatting strings

If you need to format your strings using String.format(String, Object...) , then you can do so by putting your format arguments in the string resource. For example, with the following resource:

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

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 arguements from your application like this:

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

Styling with HTML markup

You can add styling to your strings with HTML markup. For example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>     name="welcome">Welcome to Android!

Supported HTML elements include:

• for bold text.
• for italic text.
• for underline text.

String escapedUsername = TextUtil.htmlEncode(username);Resources res = getResources();String text = String.format(res.getString(R.string.welcome_messages), escapedUsername, mailCount);CharSequence styledText = Html.fromHtml(text);