setText(getString(R.strings.whatever) or setText(R.strings.whatever)?

android

Solution

The second approach is more elegant, since internally, the `TextView` (or whatever `View`-class) will do the job of getting the String for your specified resource.

Letting components do the internal work is always preferred. Also, it is shorter and more readable.

About the internals I talked about: If you have a look at Androids source-code, you can see that the `setText(int)`-method of `TextView` is implemented like this:

public final void setText(int resid) {
  setText(getContext().getResources().getText(resid));
}

So, it internally uses the `Context`-class to get the string from the resource-id. Now, if you look at the `getText()`-method (which also comes from the `Context`-class), you can see that it is implemented the same way:

public final String getString(int resId) {
  return getResources().getString(resId);
}

So for performance or reliability reasons, it makes no difference. Still, it is shorter and more readable.

Problem

Original source