determining if resources such as those in strings.xml are no longer used

I have done some signifi开发者_运维问答cant re-coding on one of my Android programs and now I am unsure if certain xml strings are used anymore. In addition I have a few translations which makes the task even more difficult. Is there a tool to test this? This would be useful for drawables also.

I am using the eclipse plugin.

This question has been discussed in the irc channel before. There is no tool to test it, but I agree it would be useful. Note that resources can be referenced in xml, but they can also be referenced from code. Furthermore, resources can also be looked up by their identifier, and such lookup could be determined by runtime.

So actually you cannot determine 100% whether a resource is used or not anymore, but you can probably determine which resources are referenced in a static way (in xml or code). Depending on your code/app which you know best yourself, such approach might be sufficient in many cases.

The approach would be to write a tool that parses xml and java source files and also take the import statements into consideration. With that information you should be able to determine which resources you can get rid of.

The easiest way is to remove them all, attempt to compile, and re-add those the compiler says are lacking. It's a little tiresome, but it's certainly tractable.

Note, as Mathias already pointed out, that it's technically possible to access resources by name with a string at runtime, and the way I suggest here would remove such resources though they are, in fact, needed. However, this pattern should be really rarely seen in any application, and if you are the one who wrote it, you already know if/where you do such treatment.

Use grep to extract a list of resources to a file by way of sort

Use recursive grep through sort and uniq to create a list of those mentioned in any source file (make a copy of project without unused files or dispatch grep on a list of used ones, of course commented out code will be an issue)

Use diff on the two lists