Android, getting resource ID from string?

Question

I need to pass a resource ID to a method in one of my classes. It needs to use both the id that the reference points to and also it needs the string. How should I best achieve this?

For example:

R.drawable.icon

I need to get the integer ID of this, but I also need access to the string "icon".

It would be preferable if all I had to pass to the method is the "icon" string.

Answer 1

@EboMike: I didn't know that Resources.getIdentifier() existed.

In my projects I used the following code to do that:

public static int getResId(String resName, Class<?> c) {

    try {
        Field idField = c.getDeclaredField(resName);
        return idField.getInt(idField);
    } catch (Exception e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
        return -1;
    } 
}

It would be used like this for getting the value of R.drawable.icon resource integer value

int resID = getResId("icon", R.drawable.class); // or other resource class

I just found a blog post saying that Resources.getIdentifier() is slower than using reflection like I did. Check it out.