How to retrieve 2D array from xml string resource for Android?

The <string-array> element of a resources file can only be used for single dimension arrays. In other words, everything between <item> and </item> is considered to be a single string.

If you want to store data in the way you describe (effectively pseudo-XML), you'll need to get the items as a single String[] using getStringArray(...) and parse the <name> and <codes> elements yourself.

Personally I'd possibly go with a de-limited format such as...

<item>Bahrain,12345</item>

...then just use split(...).

Alternatively, define each <item> as a JSONObject such as...

<item>{"name":"Bahrain","code":"12345"}</item>

Instead of multi-valued entries, I wrote about another approach where you can store your complex objects as an array, then suffix the name with an incremental integer. Loop through them and create a list of strongly-typed objects from there if needed.

<resources>    <array name="categories_0">        <item>1</item>        <item>Food</item>    </array>    <array name="categories_1">        <item>2</item>        <item>Health</item>    </array>    <array name="categories_2">        <item>3</item>        <item>Garden</item>    </array><resources>

Then you can create a static method to retrieve them:

public class ResourceHelper {    public static List<TypedArray> getMultiTypedArray(Context context, String key) {        List<TypedArray> array = new ArrayList<>();        try {            Class<R.array> res = R.array.class;            Field field;            int counter = 0;            do {                field = res.getField(key + "_" + counter);                array.add(context.getResources().obtainTypedArray(field.getInt(null)));                counter++;            } while (field != null);        } catch (Exception e) {            e.printStackTrace();        } finally {            return array;        }    }}

It can be consumed like this now:

for (TypedArray item : ResourceHelper.getMultiTypedArray(this, "categories")) {    Category category = new Category();    category.ID = item.getInt(0, 0);    category.title = item.getString(1);    mCategories.add(category);}