android - Save an arraylist of Strings to shared preferences

Question

What is the best way to save an ArrayList of strings to SharedPreferences in API level 8? The only way i can think of now is to save all of the strings into one string separated by commas and save it that way. But I don't know if there is a maximum size for strings.

Is there a better way to do this?

Answer 1

If you can guarantee your Strings in ArrayList don't contain comma, you can simply use

List<String> list = new ArrayList<String>();
...
editor.putString(PREF_KEY_STRINGS, TextUtils.join(",", list));

and to read the list

String serialized = prefs.getString(PREF_KEY_STRINGS, null);
List<String> list = Arrays.asList(TextUtils.split(serialized, ","));

You are limited by the memory of the device. It's good practice to use background thread to read/write shared preferences.