Eclipse and Android SDK issue “aapt.exe has stopped”

Question

I'm having an issue on my Windows 7 64-bit machine with aapt.exe. It is throwing the following error:

aapt.exe has stopped working

Its not project related, Since i've tried multiple projects, it seems to happen with any workspace in Eclipse as well. New project or old project it just keeps failing when building and running my application.

I'm using the latest JDK-6 with the latest Android SDK 22.0.1, with Build Tools and Platform tools.

Deleting the entire SDK and Eclipse and unziping and resetting up doesnt seem to resolve it either.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Remove id from style like here @+id then build again you get success...

<item name="android:id">@+id/calender</item>

Answer 2

it seems you were missing some entries in strings.xml

in my case I was deleting <string name="action_settings">Settings</string>

thinking it was not used by the project and placing it back solved the issue. You can search for same or similar type of tag in you project.

Answer 3

This can also happen if you have an incorrect option in an item. Example:

<item
    android:id="@+id/menu_dashboard_add_group"
    android:icon="@android:drawable/btn_plus"
    android:title="Add group"
    android:showAsAction="true">

Note the true that is invalid for android:showAsAction

Answer 4

Happens when you don't put @+id/ in menus/layout xml files.

Answer 5

Apparently it seems that the only thing that worked for me was writing back the resourse <string name="action_settings">Settings</string> after which the problem appeared. Actually I erased it in the first place because it was not used througout my open project...

Answer 6

For me, this happened when I included a ” or ' character. I'd replaced the apostrophe with ', but aapt still wanted the prefixing backslash.

Answer 7

Not sure but please try to use the Android SDK Build-Tools v18.1.1 instead of 19.0.1

It might be the case that you have error in your resource files, the v19 build-tools won't report the error but keep failing to compile the R.

Please read more detail in the 2nd comment of the question below. I also wrote the some steps I went through in the first reply. hope this will help solving your problem.

'aapt' error. Pre Compiler Build aborted

Answer 8

Donot forget + sign for id attributes in menu.xml files

<item android:id="@id/action_download_time"

vs

<item android:id="@+id/action_download_time"

Answer 9

Check if you have any string values with html codes such as non-breaking-space ( ) Remove them and clean the project. It should work.

Ram

Answer 10

For me it happend after creating a new activity by

your_package-Right-Click-> Create a new-> "Android Activity"->Fill fields->"Done"

I solved it by reverting to previous version of my app

Answer 11

It also happend for me IF ASSETS FOLDER exist any file without resolution

for examle: if ASSETS FOLDER exist any file

file:///android_asset/html/qwwww

[result] BUG! “aapt.exe has stopped”

To solve it all files should have a resolution

file:///android_asset/html/qwwww.css

Answer 12

For me it was the buildToolsVersion '21.0.0' the old one buildToolsVersion '20.0.0' works for me but the newer one crashes the aapt.exe.