How do I reference a color from a string resource to format my text?

Question

My strings.xml contains the following string resource

<string name="contacts"><font fgcolor="#FF00FFFF">+</font> Contacts</string>

It is working fine and sets the textcolor to #FF00FFFF

But if I try to reference a color

<string name="contacts"><font fgcolor="@color/strings_font_fgcolor_cyan">+</font> Contacts</string>

it does not work.

I have added the color

<color name="strings_font_fgcolor_cyan">#FF00FFFF</color>

How I can reference this color from my string resource?

Answer 1

You can't reference a color resource value from within your strings. You will have to keep using fgcolor="#FF00FFFF" or format your text at runtime.

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Everything between <string name="contacts"> and </string> is treated as your text and it is not processed any further.

If you want to use your resource color, you will have to do this at runtime, by parsing / replacing parts in your String with the loaded value, or manually adding the right tags to it.