How to keep the spaces at the end and/or at the beginning of a String?

user_116573 0
Viewed 178580

I have to concatenate these two strings from my resource/value files:

<string name="Toast_Memory_GameWon_part1">you found ALL PAIRS ! on </string>
<string name="Toast_Memory_GameWon_part2"> flips !</string>

I do it this way :

String message_all_pairs_found = getString(R.string.Toast_Memory_GameWon_part1)+total_flips+getString(R.string.Toast_Memory_GameWon_part2);

Toast.makeText(this, message_all_pairs_found, 1000).show();

But the spaces at the end of the first string and at the beginning of the second string have disappeared (when the Toast is shown) ...

What should I do ?

I guess the answer is somewhere here in this documentation link

or is it something like using &amp ; for the "&" character ??

string-concatenation android
16 Answers

Even if you use string formatting, sometimes you still need white spaces at the beginning or the end of your string. For these cases, neither escaping with \, nor xml:space attribute helps. You must use HTML entity &#160; for a whitespace.

Use &#160; for non-breakable whitespace.
Use &#032; for regular space.

user_2270140

I just use the UTF code for space "\u0020" in the strings.xml file.

<string name="some_string">\u0020The name of my string.\u0020\u0020</string>

works great. (Android loves UTF codes)

user_70091140

This question may be old, but as of now the easiest way to do it is to add quotation marks. For example:

<string name="Toast_Memory_GameWon_part1">"you found ALL PAIRS ! on "</string>
<string name="Toast_Memory_GameWon_part2">" flips !"</string>
user_52091850

Working well I'm using \u0020 

<string name="hi"> Hi \u0020 </string>
<string name="ten"> \u0020 out of 10  </string>
<string name="youHaveScored">\u0020 you have Scored \u0020</string>

Java file

String finalScore = getString(R.string.hi) +name+ getString(R.string.youHaveScored)+score+ getString(R.string.ten);
               Toast.makeText(getApplicationContext(),finalScore,Toast.LENGTH_LONG).show();

Screenshot here Image of Showing Working of this code

user_95108130

All answers here did not work for me. Instead, to add a space at the end of a string in XML i did this 

<string name="more_store">more store<b> </b> </string>
user_5026710

This may not actually answer the question (How to keep whitespaces in XML) but it may solve the underlying problem more gracefully.

Instead of relying only on the XML resources, concatenate using format strings. So first remove the whitespaces

<string name="Toast_Memory_GameWon_part1">you found ALL PAIRS ! on</string>
<string name="Toast_Memory_GameWon_part2">flips !</string>

And then build your string differently:

String message_all_pairs_found = 
      String.format(Locale.getDefault(), 
                    "%s %d %s", 
                    getString(R.string.Toast_Memory_GameWon_part1),
                    total_flips,
                    getString(R.string.Toast_Memory_GameWon_part2);

Toast.makeText(this, message_all_pairs_found, 1000).show();
user_54070400

There is also the solution of using CDATA. Example:

<string name="test"><![CDATA[Hello          world]]></string>

But in general I think \u0020 is good enough.

user_8781260

If you need the space for the purpose of later concatenating it with other strings, then you can use the string formatting approach of adding arguments to your string definition:

<string name="error_">Error: %s</string>

Then for format the string (eg if you have an error returned by the server, otherwise use getString(R.string.string_resource_example)):

String message = context.getString(R.string.error_, "Server error message here")

Which results in:

Error: Server error message here
user_27750830
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