CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidxmlspecial-characters
Waza_Be
Waza_Be

Reputation: 39556

writing some characters like '<' in an xml file

since the beginning of my programmation, I used some special character like "<-", ""<<" im my string.xml in Eclipse while developping for Android.

All worked fine for one year, but today, i just wanted to make some minor changes and began to edit my xml files.

I get now compilation error on these characters because eclipse believe it's part of the xml blocks.

Any idea on how I could add this symbol "<" in my xml files?

Thank a lot.

Upvotes: 119

Views: 75269

Answers (3)

reece
reece

Reputation: 8155

Use

&lt; for <

&gt; for >

&amp; for &

Upvotes: 310

Xebozone
Xebozone

Reputation: 510

I stumbled upon this question, as I use HTML markup in my strings.

If you refer to the Android String Resources documentation, in the section: "Styling with HTML markup" you will see that in strings.xml, you need to use &lt; for an opening bracket, but you can safely use backslash and a closing bracket. For example:

<b>Text</b>

can be written as:

&lt;b>Text&lt;/b>

in your strings.xml.

If using this HTML string in your code, you can use:

Html.fromHtml( getResources().getString(R.string.yourHTMLString )

and the output will be your bold string!

Upvotes: 4

NguyenDat
NguyenDat

Reputation: 4159

Another way to insert special character follow Moss guide: How can I write character & in android strings.xml by used Unicode definition:

Example: 

<string name="item_unknown">\u003c Item Unknown \u003e</string>

which present in string : 

< Item Unknown >

Upvotes: 27

Related Questions