Ultimate String-Array List

As an Android developer, I absolutely hate it when I have to worry about getting data for common use cases which involve things like list of countries, list of states or even letting the users enter their birth year. We see this in most android apps, especially the ones which have a form that a user needs to fill. Even if I do find the data , it is hardly in a format that I can use easily in my app. Honestly, this is 💩!

So I decided to do this 💩 work for you 😄! This repo will be a comprehensive list of common use cases like these with data in a format which is extremely easy to use in an Android app.

We have enough things to worry about as an Android developer and collecting data for common use cases shouldn't be one of them!

Current List of String-Arrays

The repository has the following list of string-array. Please note that this is continuously being updated so do check frequently. You can also send in your requests via the issue tracker. I am hoping that you take some inspiration from the categories I am adding and make contributions to this repo to make it more useful.

Name	Description
App Categories.xml	List of app categories present on the Google Play Store
Canada Province Codes.xml	List of codes of provinces in Canada
Canada Provinces.xml	List of provinces in Canada
China Province Codes.xml	List of codes of provinces in China
China Provinces.xml	List of provinces in China
Countries.xml	List of all countries in the world
Country with telephonice codes.xml	List of countries with their telephone codes.
Credit Card Networks.xml	List of credit card networks
Cuisine.xml	List of the different types of cuisines that people eat
Days of Month.xml	List of days possible in a month
EPL Clubs.xml	List of EPL Clubs(Season 14-15)
Gender.xml	List of the possible gender options
Genre.xml	List of the different genres of music
India Banks.xml	List of all the banks running in India
India Top Cities.xml	List of top cities in India
India State Codes.xml	List of codes of States in India
India States.xml	List of States in India
Months.xml	List of all the possible months of a year
Moods.xml	List of the different moods of people
Mumbai Localities.xml	List of the localities of Mumbai
Olympic Countries.xml	List of countries participating in the 2016 Olympics
Olympic Sports.xml	List of the different sports being played in 2016 Olympics
Seasons.xml	List of the possible season of a year
Sex.xml	List of different sex categories (You have a disgusting mind 😄)
US State Codes.xml	List of codes of States in the US
US States.xml	List of States in the US
Weather.xml	List of different weather conditions
Years.xml	List of years from 1900 to 2050

Why String-Arrays?

String-Arrays are extremely flexible to use and it is very easy to use them in any data structure that we might like. Don't believe me? Fine let me prove it to you!

Copy the string array you want to use and place it in the res/values/some_file_name.xml file. It would look something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<resources>
    <string-array name="months">
        <item>January</item>
        .
        .
        .
    </string-array>
</resources>

Now to access this programmatically, we can do this:

//Get it in an array of strings
String[] months = getResources().getStringArray(R.array.months);

//Convert it into a list
List<String> monthsList = new ArrayList<String>();
    list = Arrays.asList(months);

You can also combine these string arrays for use in your apps. Let's say I want a key-value pair with the state codes as the key and the state names as the value. To implement this, I can do the following:

String[] us_state_codes = getResources().getStringArray(R.array.us_state_codes);


String[] us_state = getResources().getStringArray(R.array.us_states);

final Map<String, String> m = new HashMap<String, String>();

for(int i=0;i<us_state_codes.length();i++){
  m.put(us_state_codes[i],us_states[i]);
}

As you can see, this is a really flexible way to access data and can be used in various scenarios.

Note: This is extremely basic stuff but I wanted to show these examples for people who have not worked with string-arrays before.

Contributing

Please use the issue tracker to report any discrepancies in the data or any string-arrays you would like to see.

For contributions to this repo, fell free to send a pull request.

Credits

Author: Vinay Gaba (vinaygaba@gmail.com)

License