Parsing resources with aapt2

Question

I need to parse string resources at the project build stage. Before the aapt2, I did it like this. Now with the advent of aapt2, resources are collected in the *.arsc.flat format. Disabling apt2 is not suitable as a permanent solution. How can I parse resources in this format?

Answer 1

The correct way to do this would be to parse the output APK and get the symbols from it.

However, it is a lot of work and if you just want a hacky quick-fix you can instead inspect the R.txt file that's output by the process<Variant>Resources task. It's basically a list of all the resources in the project, including all the strings. The format is a line per resource in the form of:

<java type> <resource type> <resource name> <resource ID>

So you need to find all the lines with:

int string some_string_name <ID>