Escaping % in ICS Preferences - Do I really have to write version specific string handling?

Question

I have an app that crashes on ICS. Worked fine up to then (though I'm not sure if I ever really got a honeycomb platform to test on, all of our test phones are either gingerbread or lower, and now I have a couple ICS phones to play with).

The following code (called from onResume and OnPreferenceChangeListener) from my preferences page has worked fine:

protected void setBatteryAlarmSummary(String newValue){
    Preference batteryAlarm = (Preference) findPreference( getString(R.string.battery_low_alarm) );
    StringBuilder summary = new StringBuilder();
    summary.append(getString(R.string.battery_alarm_summary_label));
    summary.append(" ");
    summary.append(newValue);
    summary.append("%");
    batteryAlarm.setSummary(summary);
}

This sets the pref summary to "Low Battery Alarm at 10%". Now, with ICS, it crashes. Not when it does the setSummary, and not when the page displays, but when you scroll the preferences even a little bit, obviously triggering a render (this item is about 8 or so items down, so it's "below the fold" on the list). Fixing ICS is easy, just escape the percent sign:

summary.append("%%");

However, that code on gingerbread displays "Low Battery Alarm at 10%%"

I can write it to change based on version, but that's just silly. Did they really break backward compatibility on their preferences rendering, or is this just a Samsung thing (which, unfortunately, is the only test platform I have for ICS right now)?

There doesn't seem to be a solution for this... http://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=14355 — Floern, Aug 13 '12 at 15:57
No, I just left it with version specific code. It worked on all the versions I had to test with. — gbryant, Nov 17 '12 at 01:00

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 27 '12 at 05:06

0

You can try the Unicode equivalent of the percent sign, like:

summary.append("\u0025");

this should work.

answered Jul 27 '12 at 05:06

ChuongPham

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The Java compiler itself will interpret this Unicode sequence. It is identical to actually writing % in the source file. – Sean Owen Jul 27 '12 at 07:27
Yes, but then you don't have to escape it if you just write it as "%". That's the difference. I have used the Unicode value in my projects without any issue. – ChuongPham Jul 27 '12 at 10:41
There is not a difference between `summary.append("%");` and `summary.append("\u0025");` though. `javac` interprets that literal. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8115522/a-unicode-newline-character-u000d-in-java I don't doubt it works for you, but it does not work in the OP's situation. – Sean Owen Jul 27 '12 at 11:37

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 27 '12 at 07:34

Normally, you handle this in strings.xml:

<string name="battery_low_alarm_summary" formatted="false">Low Battery Alarm at 10%</string>

formatted="false" will make it work in all versions of Android.

But you really want a placeholder once you localize this string. I think you will have to write:

<string name="battery_low_alarm_summary">Low Battery Alarm at %d%%</string>

I have not tested this, but, I would strongly hope that buildling using any modern version of the SDK will do the right thing here, even when the result is run on old versions of Android.

Escaping % in ICS Preferences - Do I really have to write version specific string handling?

2 Answers2